Joe Rogan is a world famous podcaster, a martial artist, a stand-up comedian, a MMA commentator, co-founder of the Onnit supplement company, the ex-host of Fear Factor, a long term friend of Alex Jones, and recently a major outlet for promoting 'alternative' Covid facts.And yet despite all these 'achievements' and his recent multi million dollar deal with Spotify many argue that a large part of Joe's appeal is that he is just a 'regular Joe'. Joe himself has said he's just a 'f**king moron' and that people should not take his opinion seriously... but does he mean it?Join Matt & Chris as they break out their dusty gym bags and enter the house of pain that is long form podcasting to try and imbibe the full Joe Rogan Experience. To aid in this glorious quest, the guys sought out the most testosterone laced JRE episode they could find and inevitable landed on a recent episode with ex-navy seal & motivational author, Jocko Willink. This is a man who everyday posts black and white photographs of his wristwatch at 4.30am with captions like 'Ready. Set. GET SOME' & 'Default: AGGRESSIVE'. If you think this means the episode will be covering the sexually arousing nature of armoured cars, the beauty of handcrafted knives, and how to revive the American manufacturing industry... you would be right. But that's not all. You will also discover surprising non-partisan 'facts' like how Tulsi Gabbad is the centrist messiah, George Soros is responsible for recent US crime waves, Nancy Pelosi is an assassin, and the Hunter Biden laptop story is the biggest story of the modern era. Oh and, of course, that Covid vaccines are dangerous and effective alternative treatments are being hushed up.Wait... what?So rev your engines, sharpen your handcrafted knives, and get ready to smash headfirst through brick walls of ignorance and faux expertise in this testosterone soaked episode as Matt & Chris refuse to acquiesce to the 'burden of civility'.P.S. Did Matt mention that he had to listen to 6hrs this week?!?LinksThe JRE 1740: Jocko WillinkThe JRE 1492: Jocko WillinkThe JRE 1742: Peter McCulloughAndrea With The Bangs Interview with Chris & MattKurzgesagt- We Lied to You... And We'll Do it Again!TIm Nguen's 'A Response to Economics as Gauge Theory'Thi Nguyen's 'Twitter: The Intimacy Machine' at the RavenSam Harris & Nicholas Christakis 'Waking up #270 - What have we learned from the Pandemic?'ZDoggMD 'Joe Rogan's Interview With Dr. Peter McCullough | A Doctor Explains'
So, a little warning for everybody, and an apology, that the audio quality for this episode is not up to our usual standards.
We had a bit of a settings malfunction this week that we weren't aware of, so I sound like a demented robot.
Sorry, Chris doesn't sound great either, even worse than usual.
We'll return to our normal sound quality standards from next episode.
Music
Hello, and welcome again to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown, and with me is the bad boy of academic podcasting, the terror of reply guys everywhere, Associate Professor Chris Kavanaugh.
Hello, Chris.
Yeah, and he's the best.
No, I also don't think I'm the terror of reply guys.
I'm their wet dream map because I actually respond to them.
That's your mistake.
Yeah, it is.
This is the problem.
This is why nobody should ever tweet.
Tweets just lead to replies and then it's all downhill from there.
It's a losing proposition.
That's right.
We should all just be journaling again.
Write it and read it back to yourself at night.
I was so annoyed by Tim on the radio today.
I was so vexed.
It was vexing.
I will write a letter to express my disagreement.
That would make us all better.
People actually had to sit down and write letters instead of just scratch out their 280 character missives and just enter.
There we go.
See, that's the problem now.
The bar for entry is too low.
You just need an opposable thumb, whereas before you had to obtain stamps and an envelope, a pen.
It was quite difficult.
I think it filtered out a lot of the dross.
Yes, indeed.
Speaking of filtering out the draws, Matt, how are you doing?
It's not a segue, no, but thanks for asking.
I think that there was a case where you were sent to celebrate your achievement, right, this week?
Something happened last week?
Oh yeah.
So I keep failing at these things.
So it was my 10 year long service award.
I was given an award for sticking around for 10 years and I accepted the invitation and I forgot to turn up.
Just a point of clarification.
Is this like when you reach a hundred, the queen gives you a letter, like that kind of thing?
Yeah, it's like that.
It's like where you officially transitioned from Wunderkind to Deadwood.
I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about it, which is why I think I blanked it out.
So I forgot to turn up to that.
And then I found out that because it was on the same day as the graduation ceremony and in my town, my campus.
So the vice chancellor, who's the big boss of the whole university had come to our little campus and was there personally to hand me my long service award.
So I stood up the vice chancellor, which is never a good But I did go to the graduation ceremony simply because my PhD student was graduating and I just wanted to be there to be supportive and so on.
But for some reason, I didn't realize it would be the big official thing with all the undergraduate students and everyone wearing the formal academic robes and the funny hats and the feathers and so on.
Why would you think that, Matt?
I mean, a graduation ceremony, it's not like they're full of pomp and circumstance or anything like that.
Sign a paper and walk away, right?
You can see how many I turn up to.
So I don't have a robe or a funny hat.
What kind of academic are you?
I just thought I was going to rock up to this thing.
So I did rock up.
I was late and I was not part of the official party that was up there on the stage.
But you were supposed to be.
I was supposed to be, but because I was late, they all saw me come into the thing and the vice chancellor was there again.
Well, that's the guy that wasn't here.
And then when the official party all sort of filed out, they sort of processed past all of the schmucks like me in the audience and they're all,
yeah.
Looking at me, one guy pointed at me with the, what the hell are you doing?
This sounds very familiar to me as your hardworking co-host, the professionalism I've come to expect over the months and years.
But here's a good thing, Chris.
Here's a great thing.
It's the advantages of rank because I was always like this 10 years ago as a humble lecturer and I was screwing up in all the same ways.
And back then I would get into trouble.
The Dean would grab me and yell at me and was quite mean about it, you know, for forgetting stuff and not showing up.
But now I think they will assume I'm doing something more important or, you know, making a podcast, for example.
Yeah.
Well, that's quite good.
I want to give, before we get into our, you know, some things that we need to announce and so on, I want to just mention that for all the people listening, and we may have people this week, you know, because we're covering Joe Rogan, who is a big figure, and sometimes we get increased downloads when we do these kind of episodes.
So, if you would like to skip forward, we have handily put in bookmarks for you, so you can avoid...
Either they're saying complaints about, oh, they talk too much nonsense.
Just push the little button on your iPhone or your Android, whatever it is.
There's handy bookmarks.
You can skip all this and go away.
And don't send complaints because I've made it easy.
We've made it easy for you by putting in these bookmark stuff, right?
So I'm just telling you.
You want to hear about Rogan?
Push that button now.
Away you go.
No complaints.
If you're still listening to this, you've got nobody to blame but yourselves.
That's right.
That's right.
So that's my public service announcement for various people.
So Chris, another little thing from me on behalf of both of us, I wanted to shout out Andrew with the bangs who had us on just a week or two ago, very kindly to mainly talk about ourselves and talk about just our podcast and how things have been going.
And so on.
And she had us on 12 months ago, which was very shortly after we started again to sort of talk about who we are and what we're doing.
It was nice.
We got to reflect a little bit on how we've been going.
And so thanks to Andrea and her channel is really nice and not culture worry and good fun.
So highly recommended from us.
We'll put a link in the show notes as professional podcasters want to say, right?
Check out the link in the show notes.
Hit subscribe.
Like and subscribe.
Send us on Instagram.
All of that.
Do all of that.
But also, Matt, I want to give two nice...
You know, we get accused of being negative, some of us.
I want to say before I talk about anything that might have been annoying this week, just a couple of things that were not annoying, that were good, in fact.
And one of them is this thing which...
You told me about, which was called Kursurgisakt.
Kursurgisakt.
It's this little video.
It's kind of adorable, where they have colorful animations with these cartoon birds.
And they're talking about science communication and science topics and various other things.
But they have this really good episode, a recent one, which is about...
What was the title of it?
Why we lie to you and we'll continue to do so.
Yes.
And it's basically talking about how science communication, but also it applies to public health messaging about the simplifications that have to go into it and how when you're representing complex bodies of knowledge, there will always be oversimplifications and things which you have to leave out.
And I think this is really relevant.
People in the heterodox sphere.
Should put down the multi-hour podcast, except this one.
Watch the 10-minute video about it.
And it will help you understand why it is that you might find that relevant experts have different points of view.
Why it is that you might find contradictions in public health messaging and so on.
And why academics are not perfect.
Public health messaging is not perfect.
And this is not unknown.
It is...
A priced in thing that you have to consider.
So I just, I really recommend it.
It's, it's a beautiful little animation.
It doesn't dumb down the issue in a video.
It presents it really well in 10 minutes and they're an excellent channel in general.
So you showed me this and promised me it was good and you did not lie.
It's, it's great.
Called Kazurgisak.
Yeah, no, it is really good.
And it also illustrates why the kind of exception hunting.
That conspiracy theorists do, finding some little inaccuracy or so on in public health messaging, is not the gotcha that they think it is.
And casergus fact is great.
It's mainly oriented towards younger people, but the information quality is good.
It's a good thing, you know.
Don't tell them about that.
No, it's ironic.
The birds are ironic.
So just watch it with your hair in the thing and you can feel good.
Like, yeah.
It's not for kids, it's for everyone.
But my son, who's like 10, has been watching it for a long time.
He's just a genius.
That's all.
I'm trying to get heterodox people to go and watch these videos.
Don't tell them they're for kids.
That's not the message.
No, that's right.
They're all very sophisticated sense makers.
That's right.
It's sophisticated sense-making.
And I'm not patronizing.
I like that.
I liked it.
I thought it was good quality information.
I'll recommend it to my students.
So there we go.
Right.
So that was a good thing.
And another good thing, this one might be a little bit more in the culture war sphere, but nonetheless, our friend and colleague, Tim Nguyen, who has appeared on the podcast, is a mathematician and an engineer or researcher at Google.
Currently, being of Eric Weinstein's existence has published an article which is up on a preprint server on the archive, this time just single author by him called A Response to Economics as Gage Theory.
And this is related to Eric's attempt to revolutionize economic theory.
He wanted to say, if we apply gauge theory, everything great will happen.
That specific topic of gauge theory has explained why this is not the case in a paper which is quite dense in mathematics and that kind of thing.
But I just want to read the last line from the abstract because I think it's great.
So our conclusion is that the main contribution of the Milani Weinstein work is that it provides a striking example of how to obscure Simple concepts through an uneconomical use of gauge theory.
And Palani is the surname of Eric's wife.
So this is a double slam.
So last time when Tim published the critical paper about Geometric Unity, the issue was, was not accepted on the preprint server, had an anonymous offer.
This paper has none of that.
So there should be no problem.
Eric will welcome it with open arms.
And there we go.
Again, it'll be in the show notes.
So please.
Check it out and give Tim a thumbs up on Twitter.
And it will be interesting to see whether Eric responds to this critique somehow.
Yeah, FreeFloat55, the anonymous troll account that has an unusual interest in Eric and only Eric topics has responded in predictable fashion.
But not to suggest that would be Eric's burner account.
I'm just mentioning.
But a random troll who only comments on Eric's things and speaks in the exact same manner as Eric has responded to in a less than substantial way.
I have one more little item for us, Chris, and it's another little shout out to something nice, something good, and it's another new one.
This is a Nguyen-heavy episode.
Nguyen-heavy.
A lot of Nguyen's.
They're doing good work.
They're doing good work, the Nguyen's.
And it's just an article we both read.
So this is C. Tai Nguyen, who was a guest on our podcast and who was great.
We've always loved the kinds of stuff he's been writing.
But he has an article in The Raven, a philosophy magazine, called Twitter, The Intimacy Machine.
And it's about how the platform invites this kind of intimate...
High context speech that is kind of tweets that are like all about knowing the context and the in-jokes and the memes and so on.
And the appeal of that kind of humor and that kind of engaging content because it's kind of referencing this sort of shared language, this shared knowledge, shared assumptions and shared values.
And then it's about how it's kind of toxic as well because it builds up this sense of belonging connecting us to strangers which feels good and then crushes.
That intimacy when you get retweeted and dumped on, when people interpret it and strip away all the context and interpret it in the least charitable fashion and so on.
Anyway, I just thought it was just a really, it just nailed it for me.
It's just a really insightful summary of what's good and also what's really bad about social media.
So we'll link to that too.
That's right.
Luke, we're giving you lots of links.
You've got homework and you've got to go away and do things.
All this positivity, Matt, it's making my toes, Kyle.
I'm not content with this.
I need to bring us back down.
I know Joe Rogan's going to do that anyway.
Spoiler, anyone, this is a hard episode.
This is a hard episode, but we'll get to that.
But just before we do, Matt, one last turn.
I'm going to spin the Twitter wheel again.
I'm sorry, everyone, but there's a lot of nonsense that happens online.
And two things that I have to highlight.
That have been going on in the heterodox sphere is the coronavirus remains a black hole of idiotic takes, right?
People cannot escape the gravitational force, the guru sphere in particular.
They're drawn to it like flies to a flame.
So we had Jordan Peterson complaining about lockdowns and asking how variants come to exist.
And his answer he proposes is a new variant is announced.
When pharmaceutical companies share prices dip.
So he thinks the Omicron variant is a way for the pharmaceutical companies to increase their profits.
Douglas Murray similarly releasing an article talking about how the Omicron isn't something we need to worry about.
This whole just as usual stuff about it's not a serious disease and everybody has been getting worked up too much about it.
Never mind the...
The millions that have died across the world or that kind of thing, right?
It's all just people getting too exercised about a minor illness.
So I just want to shout out that this remains a topic that continues to show up how bad certain people are, where they get their information from, how conspiracy-prone they are in regards to Peterson's tweet,
the share prices for the relevant.
Vaccine producing companies did not go up when the Omicron variant was announced and in fact have not gone up in a way claimed for a long period of time.
So the premise is false.
The way that variants are identified is not through pharmaceutical companies, through the scientific community and public health bodies and so on.
But we all know that it's just the guru's fear that doesn't.
And yeah.
Well, speaking of just terrible things on the internet, and in that vein, you mentioned James Lindsay, I think?
Oh, yes.
He, of all people, seems to continually manage to set new standards, to plumb new depths of awfulness.
So his latest is conducting a one-sided feud with the official account of the Auschwitz Memorial.
The reason all of this started is because James Lindsay, because he's an idiot, feels compelled to compare vaccine mandates or lockdowns, that kind of thing, to the Holocaust, to Nazi Germany and the genocide against the Jews.
So he's constantly retweeted, dunking on the Auschwitz Memorial.
Yeah, I mean, there's nothing to say about this, just apart from the fact that he continually manages to surprise in terms of how low he will go.
I know.
He's a narcissistic prick, and the whole culture war for him now is just, that's all he is.
I mean, his personality just revolves around getting retweets and notoriety on social media, like kind of being an edgelord partisan.
He gave up all of the things that he supposedly was committed to.
He's pretty much heading towards at least cultural Christian, if not outright Christian, thanks to his dealings with Michael O 'Fallon and the Christian right and his pro science.
You know, we got to respect the research has led him to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and all sorts of other.
Anything that's partisan, he'll endorse, you know, voter ballot conspiracies, all of that stuff.
Yeah, like I've been to Auschwitz.
I took students there on a tour.
It's a terrible, horrific site about a terrible event that happened in history.
It's hard to overstate the horrors of the Holocaust.
I had to read a lot about it in preparation for going on that trip.
And anybody who would think it's a good use of their time to feud with the Auschwitz Memorial site is somebody who...
I mean, you don't even need to say, but I...
I want to note that for him, it's all about just the culture war and getting his daily controversy.
So he doesn't care about what they're memorizing.
He doesn't care about the Holocaust.
It's purely about his ego and generating controversy.
It seems to be the perfect example of someone who has just absolutely no moral center and is just narcissistically driven for attention, controversy, and praise from the group of people that Respond to that kind of thing.
So, yeah, he's just he's just the perfect example of one of those axes on our garometer.
Yeah, the bad axes that like so, yeah, if anybody that still finds it hard to say publicly critical comments about James Lindsay, I basically don't respect their ability to weigh up what the relevant costs and benefits are to be nice to people.
So, yeah, he's an ass and he remains that.
The very last thing, Matt, just to say.
The character that we're looking at this week, Joe Rogan.
So we'll talk about the episodes that we're going to cover in a little second.
But in the time that we've been preparing this, he just released an episode with Peter McCulloch, who is a kind of anti-vaccine extraordinaire doctor.
Very, very into conspiracy theories.
He released an episode with him after Brett Weinstein released an episode with him predictably.
And the thing I want to mention as a counter to that is our friend, Sam Harris has released an episode with Nick Christakis, also talking about vaccines, but this time giving good information, responding to various conspiracy theories and criticisms that are around.
It's around two and a half hours long or so.
They get into quite a lot of detail and it's great.
So again, I've got differences with Sam on tons of things, but he's been very good about the vaccines and I heartily...
Recommend that episode as an antidote to what Rogan and Brett is putting out.
Yeah.
And similarly, Claire Lehman.
We certainly have all kinds of disagreements with her, but to her credit, like Sam Harris, she hasn't been sucked into that whirlpool of nonsense and conspiracy theories surrounding COVID like so many other people on that.
End of the spectrum.
And it's fair to say she's copped a fair bit of flak from it, from a portion of her constituency.
So I think it is worth recognizing when people do the right thing, even though it costs them cachet and influence.
In their in-group.
Yeah.
And this does not mean, just for clarity's sake, that therefore we endorse all of Colette's content, all of the things that Claire puts out.
There's tons of important disagreements and there's people that say, well, you shouldn't praise people like Claire or Colette when they do these kinds of things because you're endorsing them as a reliable source in general.
And I don't think that's the case.
You can say that someone did something good on this point and that you would like to see more of that.
And I would like to see more of that.
Saying is good.
Which I think we were.
So that's good.
That's the introduction over and done with.
Shall we turn to the man of the hour, Chris?
Yes.
So I figured that we probably should have gotten to earlier.
He was definitely discussed way, way back in the early days of the podcast.
And he's floated around in the ether in the background.
And it is one Joseph Rogan, MMA commentator.
He's a podcaster extraordinaire and martial artist, I guess.
He's got many hats, but his main output in recent years has been the podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which is hugely popular.
Number one podcast on Spotify very often, and he got a huge 100 million.
I was looking at some of the statistics and it seems that his reach and audiences, it's a little bit vague, but it's clearly on the same scale as broadcast news like NBC, CNN, various Fox News characters with their segments.
So yeah, he's an influential figure or certainly a very popular figure.
So yeah, worth covering.
Yeah.
And the content that we're going to cover.
So the interesting thing is that, you know, he's got thousands of episodes.
There's lots of things that we could look at.
We decided to look at something recent and we had different candidates because he does interview different kinds of people, but there does tend to be editorial tendencies, shall we say, about the kinds of people that he covers.
But what we opted for was an episode with another guru figure, Jocko Willink.
Jacko Willink is an ex Navy SEAL, now also a podcaster and writes books, kind of giving self-help advice geared primarily probably towards men and fitness tips and all those kinds of things.
So we thought this discussion would be good because one thing that is quite obvious about Joe is that he's a manly man.
He is a bro, if ever a bro existed, right?
He's in the MMA.
Smoking cigars and shooting guns while driving a tank.
That's Joe.
He's a man's man-man.
Yeah, he's a little, bald, stocky pit bull.
He has a background in MMA and he talks to tough people.
He likes to smoke cigars while he's doing it, right?
And Jocko Willink is an ex-Navy SEAL, a guy that gets up at 4 a.m. to do a thousand push-ups and bench press his family.
Before you even had your toast, right?
He's better than you.
So if we're going to get the full testosterone experience, why not combine the two of them in a single episode?
Well, I think this is an important point because J Rogan has released almost 2000 episodes, so a huge amount of content to select from.
And we chose these ones because Rocco, Jocko, I keep getting mixed up.
I like that you keep calling him Rocco.
So, you know, just go with it.
It's Rocco or Jaco.
Jaco, Bocco, whatever.
He's really similar to Joe in many ways.
So it's a good choice, I think, in terms of highlighting, like allowing Joe to be Joe, for our coverage to be more about Joe rather than, like, you know, he's interviewed physicists and scientists and all kinds of, he's a big name.
He's got a huge audience, so he gets big names.
And some of them are very good, some of them are very bad.
But we chose this one not because it was, at least I knew very little about it, and not because it's particularly super bad or good or anything like that, just because it seemed like a meeting of minds.
Two like-minded guys, we could get more of the Joe vibe.
The other thing I have to mention is that when you told me, oh, Matt, you have to go and listen to the episode with Joe and Jocko.
What?
Rocco?
Jocko.
Jocko, you got it right.
Jocko.
I didn't know that he'd interviewed Jocko 12 months ago.
So there I was, and I'm working my way through it.
I listened to three hours of the whole thing.
And you know this, Chris, because I was texting you and typing to you.
I got a live tweet DM of your experience.
And you didn't, correct me, you were nodding.
Oh yeah, this is good.
It makes sense or whatever.
It turned out, of course, I was listening to the wrong one.
So I had to listen to the new one another three hours.
So I've had six hours of Joe Rogan in the last 48 hours.
Yeah.
The amazing thing about this is all of the things that Matt said that they were talking about are the exact things that they talk about in this episode.
So the one that we've looked at.
So the episode we're looking at is 1740.
Jocko Willink, the Joe Rogan experience.
The one Matt watched was episode 1492 on YouTube.
And just a note as well that I had trouble getting the relevant clips because it's hard to get audio from Spotify.
I was helped out in that respect by Steve Donnelly, who's a listener and also a kind Patreon supporter.
So thanks to Steve.
He has a YouTube channel called Climate Change Chat for Realists, which I encourage people to check out.
In any case, when I talked to you, you mentioned that you watched it on YouTube and I was like, oh, really?
But it's not on YouTube.
Where'd you get that?
And you're like, no, no, it's there.
It's easy.
I'll show you.
I was like, oh, dear.
Oh, dear.
And then, you know, check, like, Matt, were they talking about armored cars?
And armored cars?
Like, oh, yeah.
So Matt has had six hours.
But as we found out, there's a lot of overlap in the content.
They might have said the exact same thing 12 months ago.
They even tell some of the same anecdotes.
It's crazy.
They cover the same ground.
But yeah, this is about the new one.
So if you want to listen to it, you have to subscribe to Spotify, I think, or something.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so let's get into it.
I'll say as a start, one of the things that people say about Joe all the time is a couple of things.
They say that Oh, he's just, you know, he doesn't say that he is a reliable source.
He's just a meathead and he says don't trust him.
He's just throwing his opinions out there.
He's not a political commentator.
He's just an ordinary guy.
That's why we like him.
I'm going to challenge that that is an accurate representation of what Joe does on this episode.
I'm also going to say that people point out that he has guests from all over the political spectrum.
He has pro-vaccine doctors and he has left-wing.
He had Bernie Sanders.
He likes people from across the spectrum.
And I'll just to push back to that, you know, we don't do a survey of all the content, but I will say a lot of people have noticed the editorial line in Joe's content, the topics that he returns to week in, week out.
It doesn't mean he's never going to have an episode with Steve Pinker.
Or he's never going to have an episode with Neil deGrasse Tyson or even a left-wing commentator.
But I will say I've listened to a lot of his content over the years.
If you cannot notice the consistent narratives and the obvious political through line in his content, I think you're not listening very hard.
And it will be illustrated in some of these clips, I think.
Okay, so let's get into it.
So plenty of options if I were to start, Matt.
One thing that Joe and Jocko, to some extent as well, I think could get compared to, although they wouldn't like this, is Joe has been called goop for men, right?
Because he's in the alternative medicine and self-improvement.
So you're not going to get goop promoting bow hunting and gun shooting.
But in the same respect, there are parallels.
And one of the obvious ones is like the fixation on supplements.
So when Jocko comes into the studio, he's drinking his energy drink.
And let's listen to this exchange.
Jocko Go?
What's in these things?
A little bit of goodness.
It's got a little bit of caffeine in it, 95 milligrams, like a cup of coffee.
It's got thermobromine, B6, B12.
What's thermobromine?
Stuff that helps you open up your capillaries and allow more blood flow to your system.
Ooh, it's tasty.
Oh, this is nice.
So, Matt, you know, there, I just wanted to highlight.
We pointed out that Michaela Peterson, she was selling her range of goods, right, for hangover cures and pick-me-ups and so on.
And this is very similar, right?
Jaco has devised his own energy drinks with bromines and it has this amount of caffeine and so on.
So I did notice a parallel that, like, when Gwyneth Paltrow has her friends on, They talk about the perfumes and detox drinks that they've made.
It's just another version of that, right?
Except it's energy drinks and whiskey.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course.
And Joe Rogan is obviously very much into that health and self optimization and fitness and all of that stuff.
Jocko even more so as a kind of a self-help kind of guy is very much into stuff about teaching leadership.
He's really big on leadership.
So yeah, in many ways, it is like a masculine version of Brene Brown, because if you hear Jocko, for instance, talking about leadership, he's talking about empowering other people.
And it's not necessarily bad, by the way.
A bit like Brene Brown, a little bit insipid for my tastes, but not particularly bad.
Let's listen to an example of that.
When you're in a leadership position, a lot of times from a traditional, what people imagine a leader to be, it's the person that's standing up on a pedestal and telling everyone what to do and putting out the word.
But a real leader, a real leader spends most of their time actually listening to what's going on and listening to input from the team and seeing how they perceive things and understanding what they think the team should do.
And then occasionally making a suggestion or pointing in a direction or asking an earnest question about the way we think we should do it.
And then the team goes, oh yeah, cool.
So listening leadership, Matt.
There's also the particular brand, which like is different from Brene Brown, but you know, similarly, you can hear a lot of the same self-help vibe is this concept of extreme ownership as well.
So here's him describing that.
Well, that's the first book that I wrote about leadership, extreme ownership.
And you have to learn how to do that.
And our politicians never do that.
They never say, hey, you know what?
This was my fault.
I misjudged this.
I underestimated that.
I made this mistake.
Here's what I'm going to do to fix it.
Instead, it's instant blame game.
Right, right.
It's instant blame game.
It's bitch shit.
It's bitch shit, Matt.
Yeah, I think for Joe, that is the worst put down you could possibly use to describe someone.
That being womanly and weak is just, there's nothing worse than that.
Being a bitch.
Yeah, being a bitch.
Yeah.
So, Jocko is all about...
In both episodes I listened to, it was full of anecdotes of SEAL teams and storming buildings and throwing bombs and whatever.
A lot of what he does is sort of takes the lessons of leadership and, you know, strength and preparing the situational awareness or whatever and applying it to life.
But, you know, if I take out, my impression was if I took out all of the, just the rampant testosterone and militant vibes.
It was actually pretty a bit like Brene Brown.
It was pretty, pretty standard, self-help, the psychology of leadership and so on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's also this thing about when we look at the group episode, you'll hear people talk about custom made clothing or, you know, the handcrafted goods that you can purchase in the store or whatever.
And people like to make fun of that.
But I just want to again highlight.
The meal version of this.
Just listen to them discuss Jocko's boots that he makes.
They're solid.
They're very nice hand-crafted boots.
Like, you feel it when you pick them up.
You're like, this is a real handmade boot.
Because it is legitimately a handmade boot.
Yeah.
You got to break them in.
You know, you wear them for a few days and break them in.
It's nice.
They're nice.
If you ever get a chance...
To go to Maine and see some of the machines that are used to make these boots.
You know the alien statue you just got?
Yeah.
They look like that.
They legitimately look like that.
There's millions of these little parts that hold the leather and pull it.
And then a big machine comes in and rips it.
It's crazy.
I was watching a documentary.
Yeah, no, I mean, but look, Chris, I mean, isn't this just like the Hitchter type thing?
And, you know, it's a pretty widespread idea that...
Handmade is better.
Made locally.
Locally sourced is better.
You know, real people in your local town.
It's put in the sort of the brown kind of tough guy mold, but it's kind of hipsterism, isn't it?
Yeah, but that's what I want to highlight.
It's like, you don't get to feel better than the artisan guys quaffing their $100 coffee beans because you have this same tendency.
It's just directed at knives.
And they might talk about the various knobs and whistles on their machines that make their coffee.
You talk about it when it's like the way the leather is hammered and crunched through these machines.
And again, just another illustration.
This clip I called Rusty Machines and Handcrafted Knives.
So listen to this.
We're number 215 and the fastest growing companies in America last year.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
That's awesome.
You're making great shit.
You know, like those boots are fucking legit.
Like when I got them, I was like, it's a fucking legit boot.
Hand-stitched.
You know, like I love shit like that.
I love, I'm into like mechanical things and I'm into crafted things.
Like I love handcrafted knives.
You gotta come to the factory, man.
You gotta come to the factory.
You would freak out if you saw all the people that work in there salt of the earth Americans just and then the machines that have been brought back from from rusty piles of junk into functional machines that are creating this stuff and
I just have to say that I actually think that Joe would get some pleasure out of imagining that there's rust in his shoe mixed with the sweat of real Americans after working hard at the factory with their hammers and the sweat is flying off.
He really likes the boots made with the blood and sweat of American patriots.
But you know, like we were just saying, it's all cosmetic.
I mean, that stuff is cosmetic, right?
The cultural signalling.
No, it makes the boot the soul of the boot.
You can feel it.
It's just better.
Fine Italian suit crafted for your specific body to heal it to fit your foot.
It's not like those...
I feel the same way about the problems on the barbie, you know, when it's been made by a real Australian and he's burned himself and I could see the band-aid on his hand because he's burned it.
He's a hunter.
The human blood, that just comes into the picture somewhere.
And there's a section later, we're not going to, I don't have that much clips from it, because why would I?
But they spent a large amount of time growing out about armored vehicles.
And that's fine.
Jacko is an ex-military guy.
Joe is a, you know, meathead MMA guy.
So they like armored cars.
I happen to be male.
I can find, I'm sure there's women that like armored cars too, but, you know.
They really like them.
Let me give an illustration of just how much.
Look at that fucking monster of a truck.
Goddamn, that makes my dick hard.
Look at that thing.
That thing is so awesome.
Humvees are so capable.
They are so capable.
Like I said, it's almost like it's not a car because they have so much capability the way that they're designed.
That would be the dope.
Keep that weird.
I have a video.
They're not designed for comfort.
Give me some volume.
Give me some volume.
Oh, terrible music.
Alligators, Florida.
Welcome to Florida.
Yeah, so what kind of engine?
It says the Beast Monster Humvee.
Yeah.
I don't know what to say about that.
Of course he likes hybrid cars.
I bet he likes tanks and fighter jets and bows and guns and all that.
Humvees get his dick hard, Matt.
And engines, engines.
Look at the engine.
That's what I'm talking about.
That's what you need.
Yeah!
What's this?
Give me some volume.
I love engines.
I like handcrafted knives, engines, Americans.
I love it all.
So, look, this is an aesthetic preference.
This is a thing that people will like.
And I don't have an issue with it.
Same way people having an interest in acrylic painting, right?
It's not for me.
But that's okay.
And in some respects, I'm interested in MMA and these kind of things that Joe might talk about.
I'm not so interested in the political opinions of mixed martial artists, I will say.
And at my time in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I did Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for about seven or eight years.
I met various interesting people, some very smart people, some less smart people.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is like a particular skill and people can be very good at it.
But it does not mean that they are insightful about other topics.
That is what I would say about that.
Yeah, look, of course, there's nothing wrong with liking all of those things, but it is useful to play those at the beginning, just to let people know who may not be familiar with Joe Rogan, the general vibe and the The gender affiliation and the cultural affiliation of the people present.
It does.
It does describe that pretty well.
Just in the same way that lefty, woke soy boy would be into bespoke coffee.
It's a cultural thing.
Is that the only example we've got?
What else are they into?
Actually, hipsters like knives too.
Do they like hats?
What do you just like?
They're like full of hats.
They're like fumes.
And they're like fumes.
And they like bags.
I can't believe I can't think of them.
They like cheese.
They like cheese.
Artisanal cheese.
They probably like wine.
They like those kind of beers.
What do you call them?
Like the craft beers?
Like really hoppy craft beers.
But there's actually a lot of crossover.
I think Joe Rogan could like a good craft beer.
No?
Or would he drink like made in a factory?
He drinks diesel steel.
Sweated out of machines that are making American goods.
That's what he drinks.
He just drinks gasoline from big Humvee engines.
But this is tied to, we're going to get, don't worry, we're going to get the COVID shit and we're going to get to the political stuff.
I mean, maybe this is a good entrance.
So another thing that Joe gets credit for is that he's like a salt of the earth guy.
He likes real Americans.
He likes middle America and he represents them.
And that's why he's so popular.
I'll play two clips.
One is from Jocko, the first one.
This is Jocko talking about his political party.
Who are his people?
My party is normal American.
That's what my party is.
And that's what I'm running as a normal American that's going to try and help America move forward.
And there's just no system in place to have that as an option.
You can't vote for that.
You can't vote normal.
No, you can't vote normal.
Okay.
So their party, Matt, it's normal America.
Yep.
That's it.
Who are the kind of important Americans that you want to...
I don't know that there is another group of Americans that are more red-blooded than hunters.
I mean, hunters, this is where America comes from.
Everyone's patriotic.
Yeah, there's 100% patriotism with hunters.
And so, when the hunters are given the option...
To buy something that's made in China or buy something that's made in America, there's no doubt in my mind what they're going to do.
Yeah, and a little bit later on, Joe's thinking about stuff that's still made in America and he's really glad to know that America still makes a hell of a lot of bows and still a hell of a lot of guns.
Yes, I have the relevant clip for that, Matt.
So, Americans need guns.
I mean, we're very fortunate that most of the compound bows are made here.
Well, here's a great one.
Gun manufacturers.
Gun manufacturers are made in America.
There's a lot of fucking guns made in America.
You know, and a lot of small independent companies, a lot of large companies.
Pistols, shooting sports equipment, rifles for hunting, a lot of that shit is made in America.
- Yeah, well, that's how we won freaking two world wars, right?
We can make shit faster than anybody else.
We have all this raw material, we have this technological know-how, and we were just, oh, you guys wanna go to war with us?
Cool, watch this.
We're gonna make more freaking tanks, more ships, more planes than any of you can even fathom.
Just a bit of jingoism that I laughed at the end.
He's not wrong.
America is good at making weapons of all grades.
How many guns they made.
They're just so lucky.
American society is just so fortunate.
They're just drowning in guns.
They're just scattered everywhere.
It's had so much good effect on their society.
We're just envious here in Australia.
If you have guns, you wouldn't be in this perpetual lockdown.
No, your lockdown may have technically ended, but you know, it would have ended weeks ago if you had been all on the street shooting each other or threatening the police, you know.
You kids in school, Matt, you have to harm them.
What if someone else comes in with a gun?
You need the good kid to have the gun to shoot the bad kid, right?
It's science.
It's science.
Yeah, but it'd be interesting for Americans, I think, to have the experience of Australians where if you hear about a school shooting, it's never in your country.
Imagine if you're American and every time you heard about a school shooting, it was happening in Canada.
That'd be a different feeling, wouldn't it?
Anyway.
The thing I want to say about this is getting back to that thing that you said of the self-presentation of the, you know, everyday average Joe.
Because I think that has been, for a long time, Joe's pitch.
And this was very much my impression of him when I, I hadn't listened to very much, but I knew of him, I'd seen clips.
And I was aware that people were critical of him, progressives and lefties and so on.
I very much thought that they were overreacting.
I thought he's not an academic-y, politically correct type, but there are people.
You're naturally going to be overreacting to the fact that he just says it like it is.
And it's kind of the voice of the man in the street sort of thing.
So before covering him properly here for a long time, that was my general impression.
He still leans on that.
That's something that he often invokes, but I want to suggest that maybe that's not always the case.
Let me give an illustration of what I mean where Joe might not see Normal people in the same light as himself.
But it's a move that scared people make because of the woke mob because there's a lot of these people that for Fucking years.
Hated and distrusted the pharmaceutical companies.
And now all of a sudden, they're getting Pfizer tattoos.
It's wild shit, man.
That's another flip-flop, right?
It's what happens when cowards encounter adversity.
When cowards encounter adversity, they give in quick.
They give in quick and they decide that what they're doing by giving in quick is virtuous.
They're scared.
They're scared.
They don't know what to do.
They're panicky.
And anything that fucking throws this normal...
This is going to get into this COVID stuff, but it's just that representation that anybody that would disagree with him about COVID or that kind of thing,
it's because they're weak and they're cowards that they went along with wearing masks or government restrictions.
They're too afraid to stand against agreeing like brave truth-tellers like him and Brett Weinstein or any of the other chuckleheads.
But he doesn't seem to have any consideration for, like, there are plenty of people who are brave who just disagree with him, right?
Who go along with what the government is suggesting or like recommending for public health measures because they want to help people.
And maybe they're even afraid.
About vaccines because of all the fear mongering that's been put out, but they do it.
And Joe, I'm sorry to say this, Matt, but I'm not like he was afraid.
He had these big panics in the early stages of the pandemic.
He documented in the podcast about how scared he was waking up in the night worrying that he might have got it and things might be going bad for him.
And he had all this paranoia.
And now he's flipped to it's not real.
I can beat it.
I'm a top man.
And it's just this like Disparaging look at anybody that would disagree with him because he's a, you know, there's plenty of people in this society who are vaccinated.
The majority of Americans are vaccinated and he portrays them as kind of sheeple.
I just, I hate that.
Yeah.
Self-serving preening.
Yeah.
Like we don't need to relitigate the arguments for and against vaccinations in this episode, but you know, he's obviously at this point very much against it.
And it really does Feel like he's shoehorned in this concept of being anti-vax is the brave and the strong and independent minded thing to do.
That's really on the nose, isn't it?
Yeah.
And it fits in with all the standard kind of tropes about conspiracy people, sheeple, the people who don't have the ability to see through the lies, who don't have the metal to challenge the government.
Here's another clear example from that that comes towards the end of the podcast.
It's, again, it's a thing where when things get weird and the world gets crazy, where there's no clear path, people get really, especially cowards, they get real subservient.
They give in.
They become easy to manipulate.
And they also want to point fingers at everyone who's not following the exact same path that they're following.
But meanwhile, they don't want to say a goddamn thing to all these fat people.
Because you want to talk about the super spreaders?
You want to talk about the people that are catching it and getting it and giving it away easily?
It's overweight people.
And a lot of overweight people that get vaccinated want to put themselves on a moral high ground above fit people that are unvaccinated.
And that's fucking nonsense.
It's nonsense.
It's nonsense.
It drives me crazy.
It really does.
It drives me crazy.
Yeah.
Well, something's nonsense there.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just odd, isn't it?
Like, it's weird to link together fat people with this issue of vaccination.
And he certainly doesn't consider the possibility that somebody might have evaluated the information, the sources of the information, and think that...
Getting vaccinated is a perfectly rational thing to do and a thing, furthermore, that is a pro-social thing to do.
Good for America, in his words.
He thinks that's all weak-willed people being manipulated by the state.
And also, the fat thing is because he wants to argue that that's a thing which health authorities never mention, that it's a comorbidity for adverse reactions.
But it is something that they mention.
It's not hard.
Like, I had somebody recently on Twitter say, Ever said that being obese is bad.
And I just typed into Google, CNN, obese health.
And there's tons of articles saying how to lose weight and so on.
It's this narrative.
This is one of the things that is just stupid as well.
It's kind of annoying to me that Joe gets presented as the voice of the people when the majority of Americans are overweight.
But he's basically calling anybody in that, you know, morally unfit if they get vaccinated.
But in any case.
Those people who that because of being obese, they're more likely to have negative consequences in the same way that like being older or so on, give you more chances of having worse effects because there's more strain on your body, whatever the case may be.
But those people cannot change that immediately.
They can't change it in one day.
They have to make lifestyle changes and maybe they're working.
Maybe they don't have the facilities.
They don't have the time.
Tons of reasons that people might not be in the peak of physical fitness, and it's not just due to them being lazy and weak-willed, but they can get vaccinated and they can decrease their chance by just taking a shot in one day.
So that's why the health authorities, because it's a much more reliable thing that telling everyone that they have to go out and start exercising.
So like, of course, they focus on simple things.
Like an interesting parallel there is that one thing you do see with conspiracy theorists is that strong focus on what you individually can do and verify for yourself.
And at the same time, we've seen a very strong reaction among some people of a libertarian or government skeptical bent to be aggressively against any kind Of public health measures that are broad scale population measures like vaccination,
herd immunity, that kind of thing.
Someone like Joe or self-help people generally, and this is very much in the conspirituality sphere, are super into these individualistic measures that you can take, like being super fit, like take, you know, vitamin D for some reason is different from taking a vaccination.
These things are all categorized as your individual choices.
Keep yourself in this peak physical condition that will protect you against diseases of all kinds.
And therefore, you do not need a vaccination.
Obviously, this is wrong, right?
Lots of young, healthy, fit people have died from something like COVID.
It helps you to be fit, but not as much as getting vaccinated.
But I think just ideologically, it's very much attracted to those sorts of things.
You know, we'll get into this with the monoclonal Antibodies position and some of the other views about COVID, but there's a lot of inconsistency in the way that he responds to these kind of things.
But before we talk about monoclonal antibodies, Matt, I feel we need to get more a sense of like, you know, how does Joe know all this stuff about monoclonal antibodies and all these kind of things, right?
You must have a system or like we didn't pick this episode.
In order to find a COVID heavy episode, we picked it, like we said at the start, because the kind of testosterone event horizon of Jocko and Joe meeting together.
But it turned out, as I think is very often the case now, to be a COVID heavy discussion when it wasn't talking about the sexiness of armored vehicles.
First of all, I want to mention this, that Joe Rogan's Reddit, there's a quite strong contingent of people that are highly critical, right?
They don't like the turn that he's taken to lean towards the right, especially since he's moved to Texas.
And they refer to him somewhat lovingly, not exactly, as Uncle Joe.
One thing that they do is they edit pictures of him to make him look smaller because they think he has a complex.
About being small and they also extend this gut out and all these kind of things.
So they're a little bit mean.
But in any case, Joe talking about how he knows things about COVID.
So he did this episode with Sanjay Gupta, a doctor who regularly appears on CNN and advocates for vaccination and various other things about COVID.
You know, you need to take it seriously, wear masks and so on.
And Joe had a contentious episode with him where, you know, he basically threw lots of things at him and Sanjay responded as best he could, but it was a kind of a gish gallop affair.
And this is Jaco talking about that experience to Joe.
If I had a conversation with you about military tactics and leadership in the SEALs, I would defer to you about everything.
I would just be asking questions.
You're the expert.
I think he had this idea that that's how it was gonna be.
That we're gonna have this conversation about COVID and medicine and a medical situation, and then he was going to give me all this information that was gonna straighten me out.
Ouch.
Didn't work out that way.
It didn't work out that way.
Well, I've been fucking talking to scientists and doctors and biologists and virologists for months and months and months.
You've got to be, the amount of information that you have absorbed in the past six months, right?
Maybe a year about this.
You've been tracking it.
You've been talking to all these smart people.
Man, that's rough to roll in and think that you're going to trump your statements.
Sorry.
He's certainly been exposed to a lot of information over the last 12 months, Chris.
Do you think that's a fair statement?
Yes, that is a fair statement, yes.
I'm not entirely sure whether he's absorbed it.
Well, I would say that he has absorbed the information that he's been receiving.
I think this is a really important point because we end up often talking about Dave Pizarro, when we discussed Eric Weinstein with him, that a lot of the discussions revolve around these epistemic questions about how you identify good information,
how you identify bad information.
And the thing with COVID that I've increasingly noticed is that people are just very bad at this.
They're very bad at vetoing the information or assessing it critically.
They're very good at collecting disembodied Factoids or specific spins or preprint abstracts or this kind of information, but without the ability to critically synthesize it,
right?
So it's kind of like an illusion of depth.
It's the same as a climate change skeptic who can rattle off figures that they've memorized from various talking points, but they don't know how to interpret the overall body of the data and they can't see that.
Climate change skepticism is a minority position, not just because of differences of opinion, because the weight of evidence is heavily against that position.
In that clip that I played, Joe recognizes that if he was talking to Jocko, that he would defer to his expertise in military tactics.
He wouldn't assume that he could gala that information in six months, but then they immediately pivot to, but I'm really informed.
About this topic.
And there's another clip that just makes it so clear what he means by informed.
So let me play that and then get your reaction.
Well, I think he thought that I wasn't really informed.
But I keep a fucking file on my phone.
And it's not a small file.
I'm going to show you this.
I have a folder on my phone called cooties.
And this is...
These are all...
COVID stories that I've read.
I've read every one of them.
Not COVID stories, anecdotal stories.
These are all PubMed articles.
These are all peer-reviewed data studies.
These are all VAERS reports.
These are all things on myocarditis.
These are all things on vaccine efficacy, how long it wanes, when it goes.
I've been paying attention.
I don't have an uninformed opinion.
I have a controversial opinion.
But what else is no?
If you want to be a fucking independent person, you're going to have controversial opinions.
It doesn't mean they're wrong.
He's an archetypal COVID truther.
He's read a bunch of stuff that confirms his opinion.
He's talked to some genuine experts.
He's repelled any useful information from them.
While absorbing, like a sponge, all the information from bad sources.
Rogan's a great example of what you shouldn't do.
Even that example.
So first of all, he's got a folder.
I got a folder on the phone of all the sources I've got, right?
That doesn't inspire confidence.
That's like the crazy guy at the bar who's like, "Look, it's all here!"
I've got the New World Order.
I've made these documents.
I've read all of this.
And actually, his friend, Joe's friend, Alex Jones, this is something he often does, that he gets these stacks of paper on his desk, and he's like, I've read all of these stories.
I know all of these.
And he'll rattle off references to reports and stuff.
But Knowledge Fight, this podcast, which looks critically at Alex Jones' content, repeatedly shows that he One, he doesn't actually seem to have read those documents.
He just reads the headlines.
And two, that even in the ones where he has read it, he's kind of remembered his version and he just rattles that off.
And when Joe said the examples there, he mentioned like myocarditis, how long vaccine effect is going to last, VAERS data, right?
All of these are of a particular hue.
It's not a random sample.
That those topics alone that he mentioned indicate the kind of sources that he's drawing from.
He's already demonstrated that in his podcast, which is like Pierre Corey, Brett Weinstein.
They are citing studies, but again, they're not critically examining them.
And Joe has never shown in the ability to properly critically evaluate studies.
Like he had a company that shills supplements, which did terrible studies.
You know, all of the ways that you can design a study.
You get the outcome that you want.
You collect multiple measures.
You drop cases.
You don't report things which don't reach significance.
There's tons of researcher degrees of freedom, as they're called, that allow you to achieve results that you want.
And Joe, despite people sitting down and explaining points to him, right, he never demonstrates that he gets it.
Because the next week, I've seen Peter Hotez, a doctor.
Who's an expert in virology, respond to all of the points that Joe raised about anti-vaccine.
And at that point, he was presenting himself as plain devil's advocate.
And he walked them through all of the answers.
And the next week, it's gone.
And that's always the case.
Joe can sometimes agree with people, but he simply returns to the conspiracy theorist heuristics, which are what he is.
Yeah, apparently in his interview with Sanjay Gupta, he agreed to get vaccinated, but clearly that didn't stick either.
Did he?
That seems surprising.
I mean, he tells in this episode, this anecdote where he had agreed to get vaccinated, but during that time, the J&J vaccine was removed.
And when Joe's telling, this is like him dodging a bullet, right?
Because...
Oh, there were all these heart attacks.
But like the actual story of that is that it shows, one, that there is extreme caution when it comes to vaccines, right?
There was a rare adverse side effect detected and they halted it in a whole bunch of cases, despite the fact that a lot of epidemiologists were saying, no, like you're going to make people afraid of the vaccine.
And they did with Joe, right?
He then didn't get it because he thought, well, That could have been me, right?
I could have been the one in 100,000 cases or that kind of thing.
And as you say, the sort of stuff in sites like that, the myocarditis and also the VAERS data, like we've talked about that before, but these are just total red flags for the conspiracy-minded anti-vax side of the internet.
These are non-stories really that they've beaten up.
So yeah, you know, he's a run of the mill.
Anti-vaxxer, long story short.
And that isn't surprising given his conspiratorial track record, right?
It is not.
And Matt, people will not like you saying that because they will say, well, what he didn't say, like, nobody took the vaccine and so on.
But I'm going to demonstrate for those people with clips as we continue on that to describe Joe as anti-vaccine is not inaccurate.
It's very accurate.
But just before we get off this Uncle Joe man in the pub.
Scenario.
He gives an anecdote talking about that he's going to see his wife's friends after.
And again, this magic folder of information makes an appearance.
I'm going to have to have drinks with my wife and her friends.
And I have a feeling that I'm going to have to go, well, that's not real.
And this is actually, I'm going to have to show my phone a bunch of times, pass it around.
And they're going to look at you.
He's planning to meet his wife's friends right after the recording, but he's already working out that he's going to have to show them his phone, you know, to give them the information.
This was about Kyle Rittenhouse.
Well, yeah, the context here is that they were talking about how America is totally polarized.
There are people living in completely different information spheres, and he was going to be meeting his wife's friends who were, you know, he suspects are going to be...
Too progressive and so on, and they're going to have a completely distorted and inaccurate view of the world that Joe may try to correct with his phone, right?
So the annoying thing about this is that there's a creative truth in this, obviously, that Americans are highly polarized and consuming different media sources.
And I'll go as far to say that a lot of liberal news sources do have a lot of spin in them as well.
But the annoying thing is, is that neither Joe nor Jocko have any conception at all.
Then maybe they could be in a similar kind of bubble.
It really doesn't occur to them.
No.
I noticed this pattern happened a few times throughout the discussion, which is they start off with a sort of both sidesist sort of thing, talking about polarization and so on, sort of an even-handed type of thing, but that they very quickly, little examples they give were of leftists going crazy,
about leftists being completely deluded.
About how Democrat politicians would be killing people and stuff like that.
And when they talk about Trump, for instance, the strongest thing they'll say is that he's not perfect.
To give an example of the point that you're making where they're complaining about divisiveness and partisanship, they can be quite eloquent about that.
So listen to this clip on the issue about divisiveness in the US.
That's why we're seeing so much divisiveness in America right now is there's the ego gets involved.
Yeah.
And the social media accentuates the ego and it's all about dunking on people and no one listens to what anybody else says.
Okay, so there's a problem, Matt.
Those are fair points about social media, right?
Dunking is a problem.
Another issue which I think they correctly identify as a problem.
There was another article that came out 19 of the top 20 Christian pages on Facebook were run by troll farms So 19 of these that are like calling for action.
We've got to do this We got to take back this and saying crazy shit and preposterous shit and and you know stirring up trouble 19 of them were run by troll farms.
That is so disturbing.
Yeah, it's so disturbing.
Like I said, it's working Yeah.
It's absolutely working.
Look at what happens anytime, anything that's slightly divisive, or you might have a different opinion than me, we just start getting stuck in our own echo chamber and everything gets crazy and I hate you now.
Yeah, so it's pretty good, doesn't it?
People should be nice around the internet.
It is disturbing that Christian groups in the United States who are known to be somewhere towards the right that are infiltrated by trolls, perhaps.
I don't know if that's true, but it might be.
Yes?
Yeah, agreed, Matt.
We can be...
We're all on board with these messages.
Good job, Jaco and Joe.
So let's see what they go on to talk about almost immediately after making these points.
That was three and a half years the American public was getting beat down with the Russia collusion thing.
And it wasn't real.
And it was created.
It was created by the Democratic Party.
Maybe that's not the exact thing, but it was created by people that were insiders in the Democratic Party.
Yeah, and no one's being held accountable.
No one's going to jail for it.
But they were trying to literally impeach Trump for some shit that they made up.
But it's, look, Trump's not a perfect guy.
This is not a pro-Trump speech.
I think it's safe to say Trump is not a perfect guy.
But this fucking, this thing that he kept saying about the deep state, it's real.
Yeah.
It's 100% real.
The swamp is real.
The swamp is definitely real.
They're fucking real monsters.
That clip is very telling.
One thing is that Joe talks about, he kind of conflates Russiagate and collusion and the impeachments, right?
But Trump was not impeached for collusion.
The first impeachment was because he was engaged in abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
And it was related to putting pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden in order to help his re-election bid.
So that wasn't invented.
That all happened.
And the second impeachment was for the January 6th riots, which again happened.
And Trump played a significant role in.
So Joe's like saying, you know, he's talking about maybe people called for impeachment, but the actual reasons.
That Trump was impeached were completely legitimate.
Yeah.
Good point.
I guess with all of those Russian connections, I mean, you know, there's a lot of suspicious stuff demonstrably went on, right?
Yeah.
And in terms of links between Russia and support of Putin's regime for the Republican Party and An unwarranted friendliness, I think.
Yeah.
Some people tend to focus on the collusion issue, right?
And they can find these examples where various democratic figures or liberal media people over-egged it, right?
Mitchell Madel is a clear example of this.
But they then use that to kind of dismiss that nothing was...
And that's not true.
Trump initially was claiming there were no meetings between anybody on his campaign and anything to do with Russia.
And that was untrue.
There were meetings in Trump Tower between his son, Jared Kushner, and people associated with the Russian government.
And then the Mueller report did not exonerate Trump, except from saying that they cannot find evidence of direct collusion.
But they find a lot of skeevy connections there.
And it is still true that Trump, the only consistent thread that you can see to Trump is a deference towards Putin.
And yes, he was fond of all our dictators, but there was a press conference that even the conservative media were disgusted with his performance at a member.
And people point out that Trump's government was...
Still enforcing sanctions on Russia and various things.
But the argument is not that the Republican Party is not a Russia hawk in many respects.
It's that Trump is not.
And it doesn't mean he's a direct agent, evidence of them having the pee tape or that kind of thing.
To me, that isn't it.
The evidence is just that Russia did launch a campaign to support Trump to be elected.
Probably just to fuck with American democracy.
And that did happen.
And Trump called for them to do that.
He displayed consistent deference to Putin.
And various people in this campaign had dodgy connections with Russian interests.
So it does not mean collusion was proven.
It doesn't mean that a lot of the connections were tied to his campaign.
But the whole thing that none of it was true and it was all completely disproven.
That's not what the Mueller report said.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fair point.
You know, it fits with that whole thing that whenever Trump is mentioned, it's just, oh, he's not a perfect guy.
Yeah, we all agree.
He's not a perfect guy.
But then we're talking about the Democrats.
It's like, they should go to jail.
They should be put in jail for what they've done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
Double sex.
We have another example.
They were not spending their time trying to make the government work efficiently and make the country a better place for everyone and prop up the middle class.
No!
They were trying to regain power, and they got it with a dead man.
They got a dead man running.
By the way, Kamala Harris is the president today.
You know that?
Oh, is he out of commission for a while?
Yeah, he's getting his butthole checked.
So the reason why a woman became the very first acting president in the history of this country is because a man had a problem with his asshole.
So, Trump's not perfect, but, you know, he was right, Matt.
He was right about everything.
Biden's a dead man.
The Democrats, they don't care about people.
They just want power.
Kamala Harris is taking over the reins and blah, blah, blah.
Because Biden doesn't even have a healthy butthole.
And a little bit later on, yeah, they talk about you'd be naive and crazy to think that the Democrats wouldn't be willing to kill people.
Oh, yeah, no.
I have that exact speech, so I think that that was a surprise.
So this is kind of a crooked system that will allow someone like Nancy Pelosi, who makes, what does she make, like 200 grand a year?
Yeah.
She's worth $150 million!
How the fuck did that happen?
It's mafia.
Bro, when you look, if insider trading is illegal, how the fuck is it legal for her husband to make all these purchases of stock right before these giant deals came out that she negotiated?
And then he gets this windfall and they get...
Insanely wealthy.
Over and over and over again.
And there's no investigation into it.
There's no talking about it.
It's fucking wild, man.
It's wild shit.
Yeah.
It's mafia shit going down.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah, and they think Putin's a mobster.
Yeah.
What are you?
What are you?
Putin kills people.
Oh, you don't think any of those people will kill people?
Are you out of your fucking mind?
Are you out of your fucking mind?
You think that's where they draw the line?
Oh, they'll drone strike innocent civilians and make it, like, nothing happen.
Nothing happened.
No big deal.
But they won't kill people on purpose that are causing problems?
You're out of your fucking mind.
You are out of your fucking mind, Joe.
Like, what he's a legend, though, is...
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, like the Democrats, is offing people to make money.
And Matt, the other double standard there, apart from the insane accusation of assassination, is that he doesn't ever express these concerns when it comes to Donald Trump and his family.
Someone who openly used the presidency for enrichment, right?
Personal enrichment.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, for the record, I don't know anything about the American politicians and the rules around buying stock and insider trading, all that stuff.
I'm sure it's bad.
You know, American politics generally is pretty bad with terms of that kind of like donations, whatever.
But I mean, that's not the point.
The point that I think we're trying to make here is not that the Democrats are good actually, and the Republicans are bad.
The point is, is that Joe Rogan is a partisan.
He's a right-wing American partisan for the Republicans.
And that shouldn't be a controversial thing because if you listen to his podcast, it's so strong coming through all the time.
Yet, if you talk to people online, they will not admit that.
They will say he's just an ordinary guy, you know, man in the street, giving his opinions about stuff.
I think they're out of touch with reality or they haven't been listening.
Like you say, it's kind of this constant drumbeat of It isn't that there aren't problems with media narratives or that there isn't insider trading or whatever the case may be.
There are political scandals, especially in huge political parties.
It's inevitable.
But Joe shows absolutely no interest as it applies to one party, and he can't get enough of it on the other side.
And it's not just political parties.
Listen to him talk about media.
I mean, the collusion between the media and the government is pretty apparent, especially left-wing media and left-wing government.
It's pretty fucking apparent that there's some narratives that get shared back and forth, and they have talking points, and they don't talk about things they're not supposed to, like the Hunter Biden laptop story or something that's actual news.
Crazy.
Crazy.
Crazy story.
Because if that was the Donald Trump Jr. laptop, holy fucking shit, would that lead every night?
I mean, this whole Russia collusion story has turned out to be completely nonsense.
Like, how are people not getting it, right?
Like, what does he need to do?
Get a fucking Donald Trump tattoo on his back?
Like, just listen to him minimize the things on the right, and like, You're complaining about collusion in the media and left-wing media and government, right-wing media and Fox News and Trump,
but that's not an issue, right?
Like the people that are producing documentaries saying that the January 6th riots were nothing to do with Trump, but it was all like a false flag operation, right?
Tucker Carlson's documentary.
Yeah.
No interest in that.
No interest in that.
No, those things don't capture his attention.
Yeah.
Do we need to show any more evidence that he's a political partisan?
Because, you know, having listened to six hours of him, I'm personally convinced, but do we need to show anything more to show other people this?
Well, it'll just keep coming up, is the right.
It's impossible to avoid because it's in the DNA of the topics that he's talking about.
And I'm just going to, you know, throw another...
Random example that comes out just in passing.
It's not even like a main point of the thing that he's talking about, but just look at who his villains are.
They're making mistakes all over the place.
But this kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within by putting in these people.
Like, he's the guy who put in the guy who's the DA in Los Angeles that's letting people out.
Just lets people out.
A guy pulled a knife on a fucking sheriff, and they let him out a couple weeks later.
So did you get who is responsible for that, Matt?
That Joe suspects?
Yeah, George Soros?
Yeah, George Soros installed a particular sheriff or DA or whatever, and he's doing it to undermine America, right?
To be that nobody in the system cares about justice.
Like, he's basically talking about Soros wanting to destroy America from within, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And like, what is that except a right-wing conspiracy?
There's no other way to describe it.
And it's just incessant.
As you said, it's just woven through.
It's a continual pattern throughout the three hours that we're covering and the six hours that I listened to.
It never ends.
It just infuses everything.
I'm just astonished that people actually listen to him and don't understand that he's a right-wing ideologue.
That's the thing.
It's okay.
That's right.
They're left-wing ideologues too, you know?
And they do like full-on left-wing political podcasts.
So I think the issue for me is like, you know, Jocko and Joe, they're like the old uncles.
I mean, they're not that old, right?
During the 50s or whatever the case may be, they're almost approaching 60. But in any case, you know, like the Griswold's Christmas where you have that crazy uncle who has all these...
Views that are like slightly not politically acceptable.
And he's going to rant about the liberal media and all that kind of thing.
And that's fine.
Those people exist.
And Joe and Jocko's discussion about their political opinions or whatever, you know, it's fine.
Everybody is free to have their own opinions and to become like further right wing as they get older.
But the difference is that this is like two of those uncles together.
In front of an audience of millions of people presenting it as fact.
They deflect when they need to.
Oh, we're just idiots.
You know, who takes us seriously?
But the thing is, you're not sitting in a bar having a chat or you're not sitting at the dinner table.
You're recording it and releasing it on a podcast.
And people like it, but that's what it is.
It's basically propaganda.
I mean, it's sort of crowdsourced.
Or independently produced propaganda.
And as you say, it is presented as facts.
There is this very occasional disclaimer of, oh, you know, I'm just a dummy.
But man, it's really occasional.
And it comes after 20 or 25 minutes of emphatic, 100% certainty about facts.
And in fact, speaking of facts, Rogan is quite clear in talking about why people Are preferring podcasts like his rather than the mainstream media is because the mainstream media, according to Joe is full of people's opinions and editorial things,
and they should just stick to presenting facts like podcasts.
Yeah.
So the disclaimers don't really do much.
No.
Yeah.
So I have a large amount of curves.
That highlight that.
But perhaps this is one of the best ones where he's talking about how when you compare alternative media to mainstream media, how does it work out?
And he says: Their fucking ratings are abysmal and they complain about podcasts doing better than they.
Well, why do you think podcasts doing better?
Because if someone's, whether they're watching Jimmy Dore or Kyle Kalinske or whoever it is, you could trust them.
This is their actual opinion.
They really tell the truth and they're going to provide you facts because they're independent.
So they depend upon those facts to get the word out.
When they talk about what's going on in Syria or Russia or wherever the fuck it is in the world, they have to have facts and they have to show you why they come to these conclusions.
CNN doesn't have to do that because they're not really.
They're entertainment news that supports the left-wing narrative, which is why Kyle Kalinske and Jimmy Dore, they all talked about the Hunter Biden laptop.
Everybody did.
Everybody did.
Yeah, it goes on.
Hunter Biden laptop.
Bing!
Justin, I want to mention as well there, the examples that he gives.
It's like he can't resist giving terrible examples because like Jimmy Dore on Syria.
Jimmy Doe is a Syrian apologist, somebody who argues there weren't chemical weapons attacks and this.
And no, he doesn't document precisely all I think.
He just gives the standard like conspiracy theory, gray zone line.
Joe, he mistakes people providing like any indication of a document or a reference to study as that's the receipts.
No, that.
That isn't the case.
There can be also issues with the media oversimplifying things, but presenting like Tim Poole and Jimmy Dore, like alternative media, as if they are not based on opinion, that it's all facts.
No, they fucking don't.
They are almost entirely opinion journalism.
That's it.
Yeah, you could just see how Joe is epistemic.
Is just broken, you know, and he's not the only one who just happens to be someone with a massive platform.
But as you say, he has no idea what a trustworthy source looks like.
He mistakes waving around, as you say, some random factoids or some spurious thing as the evidence.
And he thinks that, you know, doing his half-assed Google searching and saving some articles to his iPhone.
It means that he's better informed than somebody with genuine expertise and a background in it.
Like somebody who's got good epistemics has an appreciation for their own limitations and has, has a better internal guide as to how to weigh up sources of evidence.
It doesn't fall for all of those really obvious traps.
So yeah.
So I want to enumerate the little learnings we're developing here.
The first one.
Joe Rogan is a political partisan, if not a total ideal.
Don't try to tell me he's not.
That's the first one.
The second one, he's just got terrible epistemics like all conspiracy theorists, has no idea how to figure out what sources to trust and how to develop an accurate view of the world, how to navigate the infosphere without getting totally diluted by misinformation.
So that's our two things so far.
An illustration of this point, Matt, but first of all, again, Just to point out that they can have, they can reference important points and good heuristics, right?
So here's them talking about the issue of clickbait headlines.
And then the other thing is that driving them to do this is that the more dramatic the headline, the more people click on it, right?
Yeah, that's the big thing.
That's the big thing because that's where the money is.
Okay, so the money is in clickbait headlines.
That's true.
That's true.
It is true.
Yes, that's true.
Now, here's Joe talking about a story which he brings up shortly after that point.
You need to see this article because you're not going to fucking believe that it's real.
Because two people died.
They emptied 70 rounds on a crowded street.
People were driving around the body.
There's video footage of this fucking gang fight.
70 rounds!
If you just shoot a gun in the street, you're supposed to go to jail.
You just empty a gun.
You shoot at someone.
Look at this.
Prosecutors reject charges against five suspects in deadly gang-related gunfight.
See, now, this is where you get all tinfoil hat, because a lot of people, like George Soros and all that kind of shit, look at the way he described it.
A police report framed the state attorney's office decision to decline charges in a different light.
He writes, mutual combatants was cited as the reason for the rejection.
Mutual combat is a legal term used to find a fight or a struggle that two parties
Yeah, not a gunfight!
That's insane.
It's not a fucking gunfight!
Guns!
Matt, the example here, first of all, we got fucking Soros again invoked, right?
Some people are saying Soros.
Like, who?
You!
It's you!
You're the one saying Soros.
But the other thing is, I looked into this story for my sins.
I was like, what is this story about?
What Joe's talking about is that there was a gang shooting.
There was a gunfight between feuding gangs in the street and there was somebody killed.
Tragic circumstance.
Now, the police arrested a whole bunch of people there involved in the shooting.
Looking into the story, right?
Going beyond the headline and beyond the reacting.
To the individual story on Fox News that he's citing there.
You find out that why the DA are refusing to prosecute is because they don't have any proof about who shot.
There's a gunfight with people shooting.
The video evidence is unclear about who is who.
And more to the point, none of the people involved are willing to press charges.
The witnesses, the people shooting.
So the DA.
Says, we can't secure a prosecution, so we can't proceed with the case because we don't have any witnesses.
We don't have good evidence.
And the governor or the mayor used it as a kind of campaigning thing to say, I want tough justice, but they won't bring the case.
And some of the police also issued statements, but it's a technical issue, right?
It isn't that nobody cares about law and order.
And the prosecutor complained saying, People are using this as a political football.
This isn't.
It's about matters of law.
We only pursue cases that we think we can win.
We don't do it for political points.
And Joe is exactly doing the thing that he's saying, you know, that people shouldn't do.
He's just reading a headline on Fox News, getting outraged, and assuming George Soros is behind it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's so many instances of that where they make perfectly reasonable, if bland, points.
There's a lot of dunking in social media is toxic.
That there's a lot of polarization and people are living in epistemic bubbles.
That people just read headlines and then jump to conclusions based on emotions and so on that fit the narratives.
Those are totally, you know, not particularly profound points in 2021.
Everyone knows this, right?
But the total lack of self-awareness about what they're doing, all of those things.
It hurts your soul.
It does.
It's like they can mention about responding to headlines and then Joe's like, oh, where do you see this headline?
It's that quick, isn't it?
Yeah, and you're like, what?
How could you get that?
And another example, so Tulsi Gabbard.
There's one person that Joe, in Joe and Jocko world, is a fucking angel.
There's nobody better than Tulsi Gabbard.
The Democratic senator who is a darling of right-wing media and Fox, who could have guessed that this would be a figure that Joe and Jocko like.
But I have to play because the extent to which they love her, it's impossible to oversee it.
So I have a folder which is, it's like 10 clubs just called Tulsi Love.
So let me just illustrate how much.
Tulsi appeals to them.
So here's Joe first talking about Tulsi.
You know, and Tulsi Gabbard, they were never going to go with her.
God, they hated her.
She's just too independent.
Yeah.
She's too powerful.
Yeah.
She's got too many principles.
You know?
I mean, if you looked at that, if you look at her, first of all, there's no dirt on her.
If there was, they would have already had it.
Okay?
So you know she's a solid person.
Okay?
So she's too powerful.
She's too principled.
That's a problem.
Yeah.
And in case you didn't get that the first time.
I mean, they did not like her by any stretch of the imagination.
There's not a fucking chance in hell they wanted her.
Because she's just too independent and she's too principled.
But if you looked, if there was dirt, they would have pulled that shit out.
They would have showed it in front of the world.
So there's no dirt, right?
Because she already ran for president.
No dirt, Matt.
That wasn't the same clip.
That's a separate clip.
And just to point out, again, Tulsi had quite a history of seeming to offer apologetics for Assad.
This was one of the main criticisms of her.
Similarly, she had involvement in a quite bizarre Hindu cult.
But in any case, no doubt, no doubt.
But there's more, Matt.
So, you know, you might have been wondering, how is Tulsi doing?
She's a congresswoman.
For eight fucking years.
She's served overseas, been deployed twice in medical units.
She's a woman of color.
She's from Hawaii.
She's super well-respected.
Great!
Her ability to communicate is fantastic.
Great leadership skills.
She's intelligent.
She's articulate.
She's everything.
She's good-looking.
She's everything you would want.
If you want your first woman president, you're going to knock it out of the park with this one.
Out of the park.
Out of the park.
This lady's a monster.
They really, really like armored vehicles and Tulsi Gabbard.
I don't know if you got that.
They're quite fond of her.
They're quite fond of her.
They talk about what if she switched parties and ran for the Republicans?
How would that go?
It would be interesting if Tulsi actually went over to the Republican side.
She gets more love from Republicans than she does from Democrats.
It's possible.
It's possible.
They already think she's a Republican.
The Democrats hate her.
She should.
She should go over there.
She shouldn't.
Jesus Christ.
Ron DeSantis and Tulsi Gabbard?
Oh, man.
Holy shit.
Good luck.
That'd be a tough one to stop right there.
Good luck!
That's 16 years right there.
That's 16 years right there.
Because they're going to win and they're going to win again.
They're both super reasonable.
And if they can actually pull this fucking country together, Tulsi might be one of the rare people that can pull people from the left and then bring them to the center.
Yeah. I just, again, so the people, you know, the ones that say he's not a political partisan, like, wise up.
You know, just Tulsi...
Is the unifying force for the country.
And this is all leading, Matt, to...
I just want to point out that, you know, whatever your opinion of Tulsi is, maybe you think, like Joe, she's a centrist candidate.
She's misjudged by the Democratic Party.
And she's going to bring everyone together.
So let's just hear the last part that they reach in this conversation that Jaco mentions.
You know, it's weird because when you had Tulsi and I on this podcast, and...
Great conversation, cool and all that.
And then she was only polling at like 3%.
It shocked me.
I thought she was kicking ass.
And she only polled at 3% with whatever the Democratic people.
Yeah.
I don't get it.
Is that weird?
It's all weird, man.
So, Matt, that's the key point, surely.
That in the Democratic primary, the reason she's not the president now is because she only polled.
At 3%, right?
That doesn't speak to her being this unifying force that is widely admired on the left.
It speaks to her being a fringe character that the independents and libertarians and Joe Rogan and Jocko love, but mainstream Democrats don't have any interest in.
The good thing that he sees happening, if Tulsi Gabbard was to be the Democrat candidate, is that it would pull Democrats away from the left, towards the center or to the right.
I mean, it just speaks to this political...
Leanings, which is fine.
You know, you can have political leanings, but I just don't think people acknowledge that.
No, they do not.
And so while we're on the topic of voting, Matt, just a quick thing.
So there's I don't know if you've heard it, but there's these concerns about voter ballot fraud and the impact that it may have had on the election.
And this is a conspiracy theory, of course.
There's no evidence of this.
Jocko and Joe being, you know, the good centrist researchers that they are, I'm sure they won't fall for that.
Who the fuck knows what's real and what's not real?
I don't know what's...
I don't believe...
Like, I don't think there's zero percent voter fraud.
I don't think there's zero percent.
Oh, there certainly is not zero percent.
It's not zero.
So what's the number?
What's up with these mail-in ballots?
You know, when...
Scholars that investigate the veracity of voting systems, they continually point to mail-in ballots as the absolute weakest link in that structure.
The real ones that are being honest about it.
Just to be clear, Joe's not saying it's fraud.
At a minimum.
It makes you suspicious.
At a minimum.
I don't have any knowledge of whether or not the election was stolen.
I have zero knowledge.
But I am 100% convinced that people hated Trump so much and were convinced, they were so 100% sure that he was a threat to democracy and that maybe even could start a nuclear war with China and destroy civilization as we know it.
And it was their duty to stop.
And if you said, "Hey, there's a way to stop him, but we're going to have to, you know, shuffle in some fake ballots, we're gonna have to..."
Fuck with some machines so that votes get switched over.
Would they do it?
I don't know if they did do it, but would they do it?
Fuck, yeah, they would do it.
There's some hardcore believers out there.
By the way, on both sides.
On Trump's side, there's people that would have done that, too, if they had the ability and the access.
And there's certainly people on the Democratic side that would do it if they had the ability and the access.
Interesting reasoning, isn't it?
I've heard this before.
I've heard all of this before.
It was Scott Adams.
Scott Adams was like this.
It's a long standard conspiracy theory.
It's interesting the little logical leaps.
There's not zero percent photo fraud, Chris.
Not zero.
You can't say there's zero.
That's like saying a non-zero number of people are eaten by sharks, so we should be very worried about the dangers of shark attacks.
Logical leap is that they've got the motive and then they've got the means because of mail-in ballots and there's that sort of allusions to the governors or whatever who control the accounting systems and so on.
And, you know, yes, they're stopping short from saying there was definitely voter fraud, but man, like how many people are listening to this who are sympathetic to those ideas that are not getting the message?
Yeah.
And we're going to have to take a pivot for a minute off the Partisan stuff because it affects everything.
It's not subtle.
So the people on Twitter who are like, oh, you know, Joe endorsed Bernie and stuff.
There are people who voted for Bernie and then switched to vote for Trump.
There is an obvious DNA there that if you're a contrarian or you want to F the system, that you might like it F in a left-wing flavor or right-wing flavor.
There are...
Overlaps.
Populism is the overlap.
Yeah, exactly.
Of course, he's got some left-wing views.
I'm sure he's in favor of drug legalization, right?
And same-sex marriage.
Same-sex marriage talks about the environment, right?
But if you look at the stuff that gets him animated and the issues that concern him, he's someone who just happens to be concerned about voter fraud and the stolen election.
And George Soros.
And George Soros.
And happens to be concerned about the mental abilities of Joe Biden.
You know, I won't give off the entire list, but the pattern's pretty goddamn clear.
I know.
And I said, I'm going to get off it, Matt, but Joe Biden.
So just remember the criticism of Trump, the tone that it was reached in.
Now, when it comes to Biden, there's a slightly different tone.
That you might detect.
If you listen very carefully, you can hear a slight difference.
Listening to his speech.
No one said that.
By the way, it took forever for him to even fucking address it.
I mean, it took a long ass time.
I don't even blame.
He's gone.
The guy's gone, right?
If he was my grandpa, I would be like, Grandma, you can't let him drive anymore.
You can't let him drive anymore.
He doesn't know what the fuck's going on.
Like, this is how bad he is.
This is a fact.
This is a fact.
And people were so fucking mad that I was saying this before the election.
I'm like, what do you want me to lie because you hate Trump?
So you want me to be a liar because you hate Trump?
You don't have to love Biden.
It's fine to point out that he's not as sharp as he used to be, but it's the double standards.
That's what rankles.
Okay, Matt.
I said we'll get out of the political partisanship.
I'll take you to somewhere that I thought was...
A bit funny.
It's at Joe's expense, admittedly.
It's at Joe's expense.
But there comes a part where they engage in some cultural criticism.
And Jaco's a bit concerned about Chinese movies and the messages that they're sending off.
So let's hear Jaco introduce the topic.
You can Google them, but they're these propaganda films where, like, the Chinese wolf warrior, this is a pack of sort of elite.
Chinese commandos, and they fight Americans.
And the Americans that they fight generally are Navy SEALs.
Like the closing scene, I haven't watched the whole movies, but the closing scene, I think it's Wolf Warrior II, is this Chinese hero fighting against this Navy SEAL American, like hand-to-hand combat.
And by the way, they're fighting to free these...
There's other people that are kind of in cages looking on, and it's the Chinese individuals fighting for the glory and for the freedom of these other people, and the American is fighting for some big corporate greed scenario.
Yeah, it's very strange.
There it is.
Chris, as it happens, I just watched a movie yesterday called Nobody.
Have you heard of this movie?
Nobody.
Oh, that's the, yeah, yeah, the American Better Call Saul guy.
Yeah, that's why I watched it, because I really liked that character.
It turned out to be a pretty disappointing action movie.
But in this movie, he's like an ex-covert operations secret service guy with the tattoo for his unit and stuff like that.
And he's a cold-blooded killer, right?
Like he's got skills.
And in this movie, the bad guys are these Russian gangsters.
The Russians, these are the bad guys, right?
And in his all-American way with his grandpa, actually, he's got a shotgun and his buddy, a black guy, he's like a sniper guy.
They polish off like 30 or 50 of these Russian bad guys, right?
Who are just evil, evil.
What?
It's unheard of, Matthew.
It's not like foreigners are usually bad guys in American movies.
It's like the American movie, for some reason, had chosen the Russians as the bad guy.
It's obviously very common.
I was watching these Russian movies, right?
And they are propaganda type movies, you know, Heroics of World War II and so on.
And I've got no doubt, right, that the Chinese government is sponsoring and encouraging nationalist movies.
But hello, Joe.
Have you seen any American action movies over the last, I don't know, 40 years?
Who are the bad guys?
Who are the bad guys?
It's like, just think of all those movies from the 80s with the ninja warriors, like American Ninja.
The bad guys were all the Japanese, right?
And is America at war with Japan now?
No.
They had economic conflict and concerns, so they show up in the media.
And again, like you say, it's not to say the Chinese government doesn't encourage negative views of American military and stuff.
Of course they do.
But the point is, so does American popular media.
But anyway, this is why they're concerned about it, okay?
We're not doing fair.
Let's hear their argument.
So they're making propaganda films, anti-American propaganda films.
And the thing that's scary about this is, you know, China is thinking very strategically about things.
They're thinking about how to defeat America in 20 years or 25 years.
That's what they're thinking about.
That's what they're planning for.
That's why they're making films like this.
And what is America thinking about?
We're thinking about the next election cycle.
That's what we're thinking about.
I thought he was going to say a cheeseburger.
So I suppose it's at least politics they're thinking about.
But like, it's good that the Chinese are hive mind where the film industry, they're all set on conquering America in 20 years.
Whereas like America's problem is the individualism means that people have all these different motivations.
They're not unified.
What America would do better to have is a one-party system with a ruler that is not replaced every four years, because then you'd be able to have unity of purpose, like in China.
Well, you know, they talk a lot about leadership and patriotism and America first, but I don't know.
Wolf Warrior 2, Matt.
That's where it's at.
It's just the double standard of, like you say, American movies.
The British are basically a nationality.
Of bad guys in American movies.
They populated the Death Star.
They were the Empire in Star Wars.
It's not subtle.
And that's fine because they are the bad guys in global history and the world not.
So, you know, they're accurately representing things, but I'm just pointing out that it is the case.
Yeah.
Well, look, my point here is that this is not a pro.
Chinese Communist Party podcast at all.
Oh, yes, it is.
Okay, they are sponsoring us under the table a little bit, but yeah, it's just, come on, show a little bit of self-awareness because the rest of the podcast is all about American nationalism.
America!
Yeah, it really is, you know, and even that doesn't trigger me that much, but, you know, you can't get that upset if you're going to do that to be about Other countries being nationalist too.
I don't like either of them at all.
But coming from these two, just without any acknowledgement of it.
They call it patriotism.
They don't call it nationalism.
But another person's nationalism is someone's patriotism.
But Joe links this topic, can you imagine, Matt, to wokeness?
What?
You didn't think there was a woke angle coming.
But let me hit you with it.
What's crazy is that They're making anti-American propaganda films, and we are making films that are run through the Chinese government to make sure that certain things aren't offensive.
That's what's scary.
They're changing Marvel Comics characters, you know that?
Like Doctor Strange?
Doctor Strange was a physician who had this accident and then...
We went and studied with this Tibetan mystic and developed all these supernatural powers, right?
China doesn't believe in Tibet, doesn't believe Tibet should have any freedom.
So instead of a Tibetan mystic, it's a woman and she's got a shaved head and it's a white woman.
So Matt, can I just note that like the woke thing is not, that's actually the anti-woke argument, right?
That a white person should portray an Asian.
Particularly an affluent white woman.
In Woke Dogma, they are not the top of the pecking order.
That's whitewashing, according to Woke Dogma, isn't it?
Exactly.
But even then, this is not true, because I looked this story up too, and the character was indeed changed.
But the reason the director gave, so maybe he's lying, there's a possibility he's lying, but he said that they chose not to do that because the character was a racial stereotype, a kind of Fu Manchu character.
And they didn't want to go that way.
They wanted Tilda Swinton for the role.
And so they decided to make it like an ancient Celtic figure instead.
So Joe and Jocko should actually be pro this.
They converted it to like, You know, they were just complaining about not being pro-Western enough.
So they converted a heroic character to a figure like from the Western tradition.
They should be up their alley.
Yeah, like I see that some Tibetans are upset about this change, but I can also understand that a lot of the characters they use in these comic books, like comic books are just a different medium, right?
And they tend to be a bit broader, a bit more stereotypical.
All of that stuff.
It's just a different stylistic kind of thing.
And with these more sophisticated superhero type movies, they're going for a more realistic, naturalistic tone.
I really hate them, by the way.
I hate superhero movies.
I think they're all stupid.
But as you say, it's just highly implausible that the director was Influenced by China to avoid putting in a character whose backstory is that he's from Tibet and not even changing.
You could have changed into like a generic Asian type character, right?
From some, not mentioned Tibet.
The Chinese?
The Chinese or whatever.
I could have done that, but no.
So it doesn't make sense.
The Chinese wanted Tilda Swinton.
Yeah, that's right.
The men who came in from Beijing, making a white woman, people, it's the martial arts expert in your thing.
It's clearly not true.
Yet another example.
I'm shocked.
I'm absolutely shocked about Joe reading some clickbait on the internet.
And there are examples he could have given of China influencing movies.
So it does happen.
But it was the fact that he took this example.
It just annoyed me because I looked it up and was like, no, this is a bad example.
Yeah, that's right.
Like there's always like a reasonable version of it that I can imagine and play in my head.
Like there is no doubt that China at the moment is getting more militaristic, more nationalistic, and is employing propaganda of various kinds to instill more of that feeling among the Chinese people.
But on the other hand, it's Them having movies in which Americans are the bad guys, that's not a good illustrative example of that tendency.
Of course.
Who else are they going to choose?
You know what I mean?
Come on.
I know, Mark.
Movies need bad guys.
Movies need foreigner bad guys.
This is my point.
If you want to make a stupid action movie, you need some evil foreigners.
Who are we going to choose?
The Dutch?
The Irish?
Come on.
What are you talking about?
You don't put bad Irish people in your movies.
We're good guys.
But after that enjoyable break from right-wing rhetoric, I do want to go back a little bit to the fun topic of anti-vaccine and COVID views.
People are into the second R now.
They're going to tap out, so we have to get this.
We shouldn't skip it.
And, you know, Joe got COVID, and he got better.
You might take from that that the reason that you got better, it could be because of all the stuff you took.
You know, you had this big thing.
You had all your dust, those rush out and give you ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies and so on.
Or it could be the reversion to the meme, which happens.
With almost everyone who gets the illness, right?
That's the point.
All you chuckle fucks keep making the point that most people recover from the illness.
That's true.
Nobody disputes that.
Most people have a reaction to some extent.
Some people don't even have a severe reaction and then they get better.
So that should be your default assumption about like...
The path of someone gets affected because that's what happens to the majority of people.
Doesn't mean it's not severe.
Doesn't mean it's not a huge problem because the fact is it does kill people.
It kills a significant amount of people, but not most people.
So you're saying a data set of one is not a good thing to extrapolate from.
That's the point you're making.
I'm actually even going further than that and saying a data set of like 40, a data set of the 50 people you know is not enough to draw those conclusions from, especially when you're a famous person known for having specific kind of views that people might share with you.
In any case, Matt, the Joe Rogan protocol, people were joking about this, but I'm not so sure Joe's joking.
I sent my friend Ari, I sent him, he just had COVID.
I sent him nurses to give him the IV vitamin drip, same way I did to Aaron Rodgers.
Same way I did to Tim Poole.
Oh, you mean Satan?
I send people.
I send people to my friends when they get sick.
I'm like, here's what you do.
I'll take care of it.
I want to hook you up.
So I just have it take, because we have a service that we use.
And so the service works nationally.
Did you have a protocol set up for yourself if you got COVID?
Yes.
And that was based on all the research that you've done?
Yeah, I was ready to go.
Yeah.
So you just had to pull the trigger?
I just had to pull the trigger and it worked.
And it worked.
Five days later.
This epitomizes it, doesn't it?
Joe Rogan doing his own research on the internet and then developing his own personal protocol to deal with COVID.
Which he then issues forth to his friends and family.
Like he sends nurses out with his protocol.
I mean, that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it?
That's the astonishing thing.
In a way, he's right.
He has done, in scare quotes, research.
He has spoken about this for hours, untold hours with so many different people, and yet he's managed to know less than somebody who picks up a pamphlet in the general practitioner's surgery and just looks at the cover.
That's where doing your own research gets you.
Actually, there's a clip that speaks to this exact thing.
We probably should have put it in at the start, but, you know, what's the matter?
It's our podcast.
It comes in the random point, like two hours in.
There's a clip of Joe talking to someone early into the pandemic and talking about vaccines.
And I just want to play what his view was back then.
Wakes people up to the value of vaccines, too.
There's so many wackos out there that think that vaccines...
Or, you know, a scam, or they're dangerous, or it's, there's so many people out there that won't vaccinate their children.
I know.
And that's one, you know, one of your best shows you ever did was Peter Hotels.
He's a dear friend of mine.
I do too.
He's a dear friend of mine, as you.
And, you know, he is one of the champions out there on this very issue.
I couldn't agree with you more.
I think that's really an important point that, you know, we got to get this idea.
These vaccines can be lifesaving.
If we had one right now, think how different.
The situation would be in order right now.
It would be radically different.
Yeah.
So keep that in mind, that Rogan, as we move on to these clips about Rogan's protocol and how it's responded to.
So, you know, there was the football player who took it, Aaron Rodgers.
And this is the kind of quality of evidence that Joe offers.
They're making it more difficult to get this.
But when you do get it, holy shit, does it work?
Yeah.
Ask Aaron Rodgers.
That motherfucker was playing real good after he recovered.
You know?
I mean, the idea that a super athlete like Aaron Rodgers, he should have to do the exact same thing as everyone when it comes to dealing with a virus.
It's nonsense.
Especially a guy like him who's literally allergic to one of the ingredients in the mRNA vaccines.
The treatments, Chris, that Joe recommends rather than taking the vaccines.
Monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, vitamin D. Am I missing anything?
Those are the three main ones, actually.
And with ivermectin, Matt, here's his description.
Completely accurate.
You know, he's read a lot of things, so I'm sure he gets the information right.
They printed that stupid story about Ivermectin and when Peter's on here like laughing about it going do you know how safe that is?
It's it and it has antiviral properties this this there's been a concerted effort to demonize Ivermectin because and listen this is a person I've taken it okay I took it while I had COVID I don't know if it's good I'm not a fucking scientist but I do know it shows there's studies All over the world where people are using it.
In Japan, they're giving it out in Japan.
They're giving it out in India.
There's a place in India called Uttar Pradesh.
It's a state in India that has 230 million people that is essentially COVID-free.
They credit ivermectin and the fact that they have a wide distribution of ivermectin.
They gave it to people to use in prophylaxis.
Anyone who's been following the COVID ivermectin debacle, there is would prick up the mention of Japan and Uttar Pradesh because This is total misinformation.
It seems to work as a rhetorical ploy because, you know, information from those places isn't easy to come by.
So it seems easier for them to portray it as this miracle success story.
Ivermectin widely deployed and totally cured COVID for everyone who was taking it.
Not true.
Yeah.
And this is recent, right?
This is a recent episode.
So by this time.
The evidence-based for ivermectin has all but collapsed.
There's documented fraud in lots of studies.
These references to Japan having vast amounts of ivermectin are all down to a single press conference and one or two random doctors recommending that.
I live in Japan.
I can tell you, as far as I've seen, this is not a treatment that anyone here talks about, gets, and Japan is at 80% vaccinated.
That's what's working here.
I know.
I even asked my wife about that as a chick and she was like, what?
Ivermectin?
And she had talked to her.
No one's heard of it.
No one's heard of it in Japan.
How could it possibly be?
It was like a news story for a couple of days because some head of Tokyo Medical Authority mentioned it, right?
But, you know, Japan's a big country, Matt.
That doesn't mean, you know, people say lots of things.
They're not a hive mind dealer.
So the government has a website where it has the recommended treatments.
Ivermectin is not on it.
We don't need to relitigate the COVID thing because everyone listening knows that it's bullshit.
But I think the main point is just about his just tragically poor information literacy skills, his complete inability to.
Absorb any accurate information about COVID, but I'm sure you've got some more evidence.
There's one thing that I want to get to, which is like, so, you know, he expressed ambivalence about the effectiveness of ivermectin, but he is not ambivalent about the effectiveness of monoclonal antibodies, right?
And this is, as far as I understand, Matt, it's like vaccination at one step removed.
Yeah.
That's my understanding, too.
And the other thing about it is that it's extremely expensive.
Not surprisingly.
But in any case, let's hear them talking about monoclonal antibodies and why they are not being promoted.
So why are they withholding it?
Because they want you to get vaccinated.
That's what I think.
I think they don't want there to be a very clear path where you don't have to be vaccinated, but if you get sick, you're going to be fine.
So, so...
Is it just the money going into the pharmaceutical companies that's driving people to want everyone to get vaxxed?
It must have an influence.
It's also the narrative.
There's also people that have been vaccinated that don't want people to get away without being vaccinated.
Because I think they know they took a chance.
I think secretly they know.
If anybody pays any attention, they know someone who's had a bad reaction to the vaccine.
Or someone who died shortly after the vaccine.
Or they've watched some fucking soccer player drop on the field of a heart attack.
So why are they withholding it?
Because they want you to get vaccinated.
That's what I think.
I think they don't want there to be a very clear path where you don't have to be vaccinated, but if you get sick, you're going to be fine.
So is it just the money?
Yeah.
So the thing about the money really gets me, because the reason why Joe could get this and why he can have a staff of medical professionals on call to deliver this monoclonal anti...
Body treatment, which I looked up and checked.
It costs thousands of dollars.
He could do this because he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
He's rich.
And he's saying his strong suspicion is that the pharmaceutical companies want to sell their $2 or $3 vaccine instead of this multi-thousand dollar treatment made by GlaxoSmithKline.
It's so stupid.
I mean, that's just ignoring all of the other rampant conspiratorial.
Antivac stuff in what he just said there.
It's just painful to listen to.
Yeah, it's not cheap.
And in any case, in terms of who makes them, right?
So they leave it at that point, but they come back to it.
And just before we get to who makes monoclonal antibodies, so, you know, there's various hedging words, but like, listen to this.
Like it's an engine for fueling views.
It's an engine for controlling the population.
And here's my biggest fear.
It's an engine for the institution of some sort of a social credit system.
And I think that's common.
And I think we got to fight like fucking tooth and claw to keep that.
Here it is.
Regeneron released data that indicated one dose antibody cocktail cut the risk of catching the virus by nearly 82% from two to eight months.
For two to eight months.
So Matt, I wanted to use that example to highlight two things.
One is the grand conspiracy theory that he weaves.
It's very similar to James Lindsay, that all of this is to introduce a Chinese-style social credit system.
We've heard that kind of thing from O 'Fallon and Lindsay and countless others.
The vaccine passports and all that, that's what it's all tied to.
But the other thing is, whenever he's citing a press release, From a pharmaceutical company for a treatment that he likes.
It's got this statistic 82% reduction.
He's just willing to completely accept it outright with no skepticism because it suits his promotion of monoclonal antibodies.
It's a double standard, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
As long as it's an alternative to the vaccines.
Yeah.
There's an awful lot of skepticism expressed towards any statistics related to.
Those orthodox vaccines.
Yeah.
There's a lot of concern that America is going to become China.
So, you know, like, listen to this.
But these aren't expensive things then.
But they used to be available everywhere.
This is the difference.
When before, probably before I started blabbing about it, and before other people started blabbing about it, you used to be able to get monoclonal antibodies everywhere in Texas and in a lot of other states too.
Is it a specific thing for COVID?
Yes.
It is 100% for COVID, and it's available through emergency use authorization, just like the vaccine is.
But it kills COVID like a bullet.
Yeah, dude, it's like a 24-hour ride, and when the ride's over, you're like, oh, hmm.
Everyone that I know that takes it says the same thing.
It killed Ari's COVID real quick.
You know the people saying Joe isn't offering medical advice and all that?
Like, listen to that.
Right?
Yeah.
Just the epistemic problems in what he's saying.
Everyone he knows who took it was fine.
Yeah.
After he recommended them and told them it works.
Yeah.
And he's had people explain the placebo.
Yeah.
As you keep saying, most people who get COVID have no treatment whatsoever are also fine unless they're old and infirm.
And probably his friends are not old and infirm, a lot of them.
So it proves nothing to have Half a dozen or a dozen friends who did the thing you suggested and got better.
It proves absolutely nothing.
You don't have to be a professor of statistics to know that.
This is nothing against monoclonal antibodies as a treatment.
And I'm sure they have a role to play in specific circumstances and so on, emergency care.
If we didn't have vaccines, they'd probably be putting everything into developing stuff like this.
But the reason why it's not...
Widely used is obvious.
It's expensive.
It's difficult to make.
It's not as effective as vaccines.
The whole point of it is that vaccines are rolled out as a public health measure.
They're free in most developed countries and they're more effective, right?
There's been more studies.
There's more, just much more information about them that went through.
Like maybe not more clinical trials, but definitely they've been through more bodies and we have a greater idea about the safety profile.
And they're much cheaper, right?
Much, much cheaper.
So on that point, Matt, so they get to this later.
So first of all, they find out who makes monoclonal antibodies and here's what you find out.
Is it like not sold by a big pharma company or something?
It's Regeneron.
Regeneron makes it.
I mean, it is.
It doesn't cost money for the person, but the state's paying for it.
Yeah.
Oh, so, okay.
There we've got an issue, right?
It's made by a pharmaceutical company.
The state has to pay something to cover it.
Now, here comes the money shot.
The same guy said that vaccines are cheaper and best way to go.
They're cheap and you can make billions of doses, he said, but our data now indicates that antibodies are the key player in the sense that they're sufficient.
You might not need the cellular immunity.
It might add something, but antibodies are sufficient based on these data to protect you from getting COVID-19.
Listen.
I don't know why it costs more money.
I don't know what the price is.
He didn't think the Regeneron could produce enough antibodies at an affordable price to use them as widely as vaccine.
Interesting.
So then you give it to people that are at bigger risk.
Yeah, or give them to people that catch it.
Yeah.
Give them to people that catch it.
You're giving the vaccines to everybody, right?
So the conspiracy evaporated.
Yeah. It was hard.
And all it took was like.
Brief Googling by the lucky, Jeremy, right?
And then they switch to like the reading and it said, oh, and even you shouldn't even be doing that, right?
You shouldn't be switching your opinion as soon as you encounter just a single article.
If that's what it takes, your information is incredibly shaky.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
There's absolutely no awareness of just how tenuous.
All of these very, very strong opinions are.
But he hasn't deviated.
It's not like he's just shooting from the hip and is feeling particularly anti-vax in this episode and next episode it's random, this, that and the other.
It's been consistent.
He played that clip from before they developed the vaccines and he was all for it because there were no conspiracies about them then because we didn't have any.
But I was listening to their episode from 12 months ago.
And it's all the same anti-vax stuff.
It's been consistent.
He's been consistent on this for at least 12 months.
Yeah.
And then there's this, you know what it builds into all this, Matt?
Like, I think this is the DNA.
So while Joe's a conspiracy theorist and he's an arrogant piece of shit in this regard, like he's got a history of endorsing various conspiracy theories.
I heard him rant and rave at an astronomer about the moon landing, right?
So he's got a history.
This is baked indium that he thinks he's now okay with we did land on the moon, but he's still got doubts about 9 /11 and all that kind of stuff.
So this is to be expected.
But the second pillar of this kind of approach is the view that he is a quite exceptional person because of his fitness and health and all his belief in health supplements and saunas.
And cold ice treatments and all these alternative health treatments, right?
So let me just give some examples of that.
How does that make any sense?
How are you pretending that some 400-pound fat guy and me are the same thing?
How are you pretending that?
I haven't been sick in 11 fucking years.
I got sick once with COVID.
I was sick for a couple days and I got over it.
But I got over it.
I guarantee you, a big part of it was monoclonal antibodies.
And all they wanted to talk about was ivermectin.
"Ivermectin, oh, he's taking horse to warmer."
That was another thing where I realized that the media was full of shit, when they're saying that I'm taking horse medication.
Yeah, okay, so that's mainly, we got the monoclonal, we got the media stuff, but the main thing was Joe is different, right?
And again...
I don't think everybody's the same.
I think I'm healthier than most people because I exercise on a regular basis.
I take vitamins every fucking day.
I'm in the sauna almost every fucking day.
I do a lot of shit.
My body works well.
And I don't think my body and a normal person's body is the same.
And they're like, you're wrong and you're in danger, you're in trouble.
And then I get COVID and then I take some medication that I've researched and I turn out to get better like that.
Yeah.
I think...
Like that provides a little peek into his worldview and also that of Jocko as well, because there's this, um, sentiment throughout, which is there are the special kind of people that leaders,
they take responsibility, they're courageous, right?
And they're strong, physically strong, mentally strong.
They're not like these fat sheeple.
And, and like, you can, The self-regard that's involved in that kind of mindset is palpable.
So it contrasts a little bit with this image of him as an average Joe, as a guy who connects with the ordinary working guy.
Like this is a guy, he lives in a freaking mansion, right?
He would got a team of doctors on call that he can summon with the click of his fingers, who has the luxury.
To be able to have saunas every day and to exercise every day, he would have a staff of people cooking for him, optimizing his diet and shit and things like that.
Yeah, but he hunts Matt and he cooks his own thing.
So just bear that in mind, bear that in mind.
I doubt he does it every day, but he's too busy producing podcasts.
He releases like three a week.
It is a particular kind of worldview.
It does put these red blooded patriotic men at the apex of it.
And it's not something where everybody gets a ticket into the club, you know?
No, no, it is not.
And, you know, there's a there's another part, Matt, where he displays like, you know, obviously he feels aggrieved by the way he's being presented in the media and he's He's quite quick to say, you know,
I'm not disparaging vaccines and all that kind of thing.
But we've already seen from the hundreds of clips that he is.
But there's a part where he's talking about the comedy store and some like breakout infection there was.
And just listen to the way he talks about the vaccinated people and compares them to himself.
Doesn't even make sense.
Not only that, but a vaccinated comic gave it to 12 people there, and it wound up spreading to a total of 40 people totally that were traced back.
Many of them went to the hospital, by the way.
Vaccinated comic.
Did they open it?
Is it open?
Yeah, it's open.
I can work there.
Meanwhile, I have better antibodies than any of those vaccinated fucks.
Better antibodies than any of those vaccinated fucks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's ridiculous.
He imagines it as, like, MMA, that, like, his antibodies could beat up vaccinated people's antibodies.
Like, ugh.
And natural immunity, Matt, natural immunity.
Despite all these people that millions and millions of people who got infected from COVID have lifelong, probably, immunity.
I mean, whatever it is, it's very long-lasting.
I mean, they've tested people now.
Jamie's got antibodies from a fucking year-plus ago.
Natural immunity, probably lifelong, Matt.
I mean, Joe's done his research, clearly.
So tell me, Chris, remind me, what is the current state of play regarding how beneficial natural immunity is versus vaccine-conferred immunity?
As far as I understand, Matt, in general, the finding is quite similar.
But I think the current weight of evidence, there's some evidence that the best is if you had both, right?
Like, you know.
If you were infected and you were vaccinated, you're kind of double protected, right?
I suppose probably for similar reasons why it seems that having different vaccines that operate differently, like say as a booster versus a thing, is maybe marginally better than having the same.
Yeah, and it's all marginal.
But the thing is with a vaccination, you're getting a specific dose, right?
They're triggering a specific reaction.
You know the date that you got your injection.
They're continuously working out the average length of time that the vaccination persists.
Whereas when it comes to a natural immunity, you don't know.
You don't know what dose of the virus you got.
You don't know usually precisely when you got it, right, because of the asymptomatic period.
So it isn't the same and it's harder to track.
And they're under this view that we should just be treating natural immunity as equally.
The same as vaccine-derived immunity.
But the point is, like public health measures, they have to make these decisions.
We're like, unless you're going to test absolutely everyone and base it just on the antibodies that they're demonstrating at that specific time.
But you can't do that.
The cost is too high, right?
Having a vaccine passport is just...
A cheaper solution and also an easier thing because you can know when people were vaccinated, they have proof of it, so on and so forth.
Yeah, I know it's just obvious, but this is the kind of thing you hear.
Well, yeah, I just wanted to make it quite clear that he's wrong about this, just like he's wrong about virtually everything he says in this podcast.
Yeah, and Matt, we'll get off the anti-vaccine stuff after this, but I just want to mention...
One reason that maybe Joe's opinion about monoclonal antibodies and any of this stuff cannot be trusted, apart from the fact that he's already told us about his resources.
But here's one specific example.
And he does hedge it, but I don't think that makes it better.
Now, this you have to check, because this is something that Tim Pool told me, and I make sure this is true, that even if you get the monoclonal antibodies and you don't have an infection, it offers you protection for eight months.
If that's true, that means the monoclonal antibodies are more effective than the vaccine.
Because the vaccine, like, four months in, I know people that have got COVID.
I know a guy who got COVID three months after getting vaccinated.
And he was like, what the fuck, man?
Like, why did I just do this?
Again, that reliance on, like, he knows a guy, right?
Like, if everyone on the planet are, you know, the same amount of people.
We're using monoclonal antibodies.
You would also have breakthrough cases, right?
Yeah.
Please don't get your information from Tim Pool and from some guy.
Yeah, but that's the thing, right?
The information might be right, but Tim Pool?
You're using Tim Pool?
And sure, then you need to check this or whatever, but like...
That speaks to the quality of information.
So what about all those peer-reviewed papers and stuff that Joe keeps in his phone?
It's not that.
What matters is what happened to his friend, what Tim Pool sent him on Facebook or whatever the hell it is.
He's just a terrible source and he pretends, he uses as a deflecting shield.
Whenever it gets criticism and it gets too hard, he comes out and says, you know, I'm just an MMA guy.
Why is anybody listening to me?
But when you listen to this, he's constantly appealing that he's not just an MMA guy.
He's a guy that has done tons of research.
He's a guy that sees all the bullshit that the media is feeding.
And if you want to get better, you know, he got better.
His friends got better.
Up to you.
He's not saying anything, but lifelong immunity from natural immunity.
Yeah, I have no doubt to that.
It's correct what you're saying.
It's an epistemic nightmare.
He's worse than Scott Adams.
I feel this honestly because Scott Adams knows what he's doing.
He's a slimy little snake.
He's mainly about Scott Adams.
And when he's partisan, he's kind of upfront about it.
You know, like he says, it's fine to be partisan.
It's good to deceive people.
Joe, on the other hand, basically, and I think he believes himself to be a centrist with no political.
Leaning and somebody who just gives his opinion on things and is not trying to sway people.
And it's bullshit.
Like he doesn't realize he's a right wing partisan spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Yep.
And that part's really hard.
I guess I said at the beginning that I really did come to it with an open mind.
Like I'd seen some stupid stuff, some clips and stuff from Joe Reagan is true.
But prior to that, I had a fair bit of sympathy.
For the kind of view I still see on Twitter all the time, which is just, you know, slightly politically incorrect.
Sometimes he doesn't stick to the, whatever the progressive dogma of the day is or whatever.
He says it like it is.
He's, he's relaxed and easygoing and it's just, it's just a casual like real talk with, with, with a guy like, like you'd have at the bar.
And I was like, yeah, I totally get the appeal of that.
And now after listening to six hours of him, which was.
Interminable, by the way.
It was punishing.
We talked about this.
I know you suffered as well, but I listened to six hours and 48 hours and it was hard, man.
It was a bad couple of days.
I wanted to do anything else.
I was trying to force myself to go back and deal with some more of this because it's just one meatheaded, stupid, misinformed, ideologue, Partisan nonsense after the other.
And it's all done with a total lack of self-awareness and complete and utter certainty.
Those little disclaimers that it gets thrown in occasionally, notwithstanding, he's 100% certain and never experiences the slightest bit of self-doubt that what he's doing and what he's saying is 100% correct.
And even when, like that clip that you played, where...
The whole conspiracy around monoclonal antibodies and stuff like that falls apart in real time.
It doesn't deter him at all.
The next minute, he'll be back on.
And that's his modus operandum.
So there's things that Joe is a specialist at.
He's a color commentator for MMA.
And I don't always agree with his things, but he knows what he's talking about when it comes to MMA.
He's also a TV presenter.
He knows stuff about the way media is.
He does have insight into that kind of thing.
And he has lots of interest, you know, hunting and armored cars, right?
I don't know how much he actually knows about armored cars, but in any case, it's not to say he has no expertise and he can't offer interesting takes.
There's videos of him showing how shallow and uninformed Dave Rubin is.
There's videos of him Highlighting Stefan Molyneux misogynistic comments, right?
He is not purely a dumb guy who never has anything worthwhile to say.
Like, that's not true.
And I know that might be sort of what the image that we've gave, but it's more like he has his areas of expertise.
And I'm not even saying he shouldn't talk about the other things that he wants to talk about, but he shouldn't treat them as if Because he's good at some things, that he knows everything.
And he'll disclaimer that.
He'll say that's not it.
He's just a stupid guy.
He's just offering his opinion.
But that's the way that he talks.
It betrays that he has a very high opinion of himself.
And that it isn't like he just offers these half-arsed things and then drops them.
He hammers it home for weeks, for years, for months, the same points.
And he'll push back against...
Scientists who tried to tell him why it's wrong.
So Joe has had some of the world's best public science communicators give him a one-on-one tutorial about vaccines for hours, and he still doesn't get it.
He still is just receptive to whatever bullshit talking point he gets to, and that deserves criticism.
Yeah.
Just very bad promotion of misinformation, dangerous misinformation in the case of COVID and also pretty dangerous misinformation with that political partisanship.
When you take it to that level, that's Scott Adams' level of stolen elections and politicians killing people and, you know, them being monsters and stuff.
I mean, that's exactly the kind of thing that he himself was saying is what's killing American discourse at the moment.
Yeah, it is bad.
It is harmful.
I can't speak to the rest of his content.
I'm sure he does know a lot about MMA.
I'm sure Jocko is fantastic at shooting and unarmed combat.
And I bet he's a great inspirational, motivational speaker about leadership.
But when, as you say, they jump in and push a quite crazy and dangerous conspiratorial overarching worldview, you know, week after week, day after day.
To such a massive audience, there is no way that you can say, oh, you know, it's all a bit of fun.
It's just a bit of light entertainment.
It's not.
It's a kind of crowdsourced propaganda that we're seeing so much in these gurus that we cover.
So, yeah, I don't like it.
I don't like it.
That's my take.
I'm not a fan.
Okay, Matt, final set of illustrations.
We'll do it quickly.
Just to highlight this point.
There's a lot of talk about American manufacturing.
Shoes, bespoke knives.
And bows.
And does not forget the guns.
And there's a kind of economic theory that they advance.
So let's hear what it is.
So what they ended up doing, they slowly took the machines, got it overseas.
And then when people started saying, hey, we need to make this in America, the line was...
It's not possible.
We can't do this in America.
We cannot do this in America.
That was the line that they all held.
It's the climate.
And they all kind of banded together.
It was like, oh, no, it's not possible.
So Pete, who started Origin, he gets 100% credit for saying, you know what?
Yes, we can.
We can build this shit in America.
Watch this.
And started bringing it.
Restructuring these looms from freaking...
They've been used for 30 years, bro.
30 years.
Piles of rust.
Piles of rust.
I don't know how many parts are in a loom, but it looks like there's like 50,000 parts in this thing.
Okay, so this is Jaco talking about his company, right?
They were shifted...
They're American-made, right?
They've got looms with 5,000 parts, and all the companies are shipping everything overseas, right?
So, like what?
You might think, Matt.
Well, for example.
Everybody's using a fucking iPhone.
Or they're using some other kind of a phone that is most likely made by people that are getting paid pennies an hour.
Yeah.
And they have nets around their fucking building to keep them from jumping off the roof.
That's reality.
That's reality.
How come we can't build a fucking cell phone in this country?
Here's the deal.
We can.
We can and and we can 100% but here's the deal someone has to say this is what we're gonna just like Pete did Someone's gonna have to say cool.
I got this and somebody asked me that the other day Hey, when are we gonna start making chips here?
I was like give me a few more years.
We have the technology We have that's something we have more know-how on how to make chips than we do on how to make on how to weave fabric I can tell you that That's that's clear.
We have the knowledge and the know-how To do that.
Everybody's using a fucking iPhone or they're using some other kind of a phone.
So Matt, we need chip manufacturing should move back to the UK or sorry, the US and Jacko might have to spear the head that if nobody's going to be doing it.
Well, he did it with the boots.
He could do it with the chips, Chris.
But same principle, same principle.
So Matt, Joe gives some ideas about what this might do to the costs of the iPhone if you were to shift manufacturing back to the US.
Here's what he thinks might happen in that case.
Apple has more money than any corporation on Earth, right?
They're like one of the richest corporations that's ever existed, if not the richest, right?
If they just said, "Hey, we're going to give you an option for an American-made phone.
We'll sell the Chinese-made phone, and it'll cost you $1,400.
We'll sell you an American-made phone, and it'll cost you $1,600."
Fucking sign me up.
Sign me up.
They're already outrageously expensive, right?
Look, tack on a couple extra bucks.
Apple has more money than any corporation.
So do you think that's what would happen, Matt?
Just as a point of comparison, Jocko's boots.
What's the average price of a boot that is made in a standard Chinese factory or whatever?
I don't know.
But I guess it's not the cost of Jocko's boots, which are, I believe, up from $300 upwards.
That's correct.
If you move all of the manufacturing to the US, Joe was talking about paying people in China pennies.
And I'm not saying that there isn't terrible working conditions in developing countries and stuff like that.
There is.
But the reason for that is precisely what he's highlighted, right?
The manufacturing costs are low.
So if you move it all to the US, it's not going to be $200 increase.
On the price of the iPhone?
Yeah, I mean, look, it's a big topic.
We're not economists, but you don't have to be an economist to see that their conversation about this stuff is not very helpful.
For one, they don't even use the words to describe what it is they're talking about, which is tariffs, protectionism, economic nationalism, right?
They talked about just making laws where you just have to buy it in America.
Let's assume they're talking about tariffs and things.
Now, there's a reason why countries like Australia are free trade countries that have worked to reduce tariffs and go for international trade in a big way over the last 30 years.
Chris, it wasn't because the politicians are super keen to help out China and don't care about the economy.
It's because it's actually a very good idea.
We don't need to get into this whole conversation.
So their idea is that it's as terrible as stuff is manufactured overseas.
We should make it in America.
There's obviously reasons to be sympathetic to that.
There has been a decline in blue collar manufacturing jobs in the United States.
Those sort of wicked class people have borne the brunt for a lot of the benefits of globalization that have been enjoyed more broadly in terms of cheaper products.
But at the same time, That drives an awful lot of economic activity too.
And in fact, the exporting of manufacturing jobs, it's a fallacy that that's the primary driver for the decline in manufacturing jobs.
Actually, the bigger driver has been the increasing automatization of manufacturing.
That's been the bigger influence, right?
So one, it's not going to fix it.
The second thing though, is that they fail to appreciate that for a company like Apple, their iPhones.
Yes, chips and manufacturing is done in places like Taiwan and China, but those, if you cost out where the financial benefits are for all the different bits that go into it, that's like pennies on the dollar.
The profits are banked in California, all of the design and development and all that intellectual stuff.
It's all happening in California because that's where the money is.
So what's happened over the last 50 years through globalism is that Western countries like the United States have exported the lowest or the least profitable components of manufacturing to places like India and China and focused, exactly as economic theory predicts,
by the way, on the high margin.
Things, including manufacturing of things like medical instruments or aircraft engines and just a whole range of other things, right?
The high value stuff is retained.
So on top of that is that, so America, places like America, export huge amounts to the rest of the world, right?
Huge exporting going on.
Now, other countries have to make something, otherwise they have to export something as well, otherwise they can't buy your shit.
They can't buy a Boeing.
Look, I don't want to get into the economics.
I'm not an economics guy.
My understanding of it is mediocre at best, but it's still about 10 levels above.
Their understanding of it is childlike.
Yeah, so protectionism, like you said, is a...
A theme that they're talking about.
And I'll just play a clip of the book game that Matt, which highlights what we're talking about.
That's part of the pride of ownership for a lot of people that buy American cars.
They want to buy American-made.
It was a time where if you drove a foreign car in Detroit, you had a real fucking problem on your hands.
Because people would throw rocks at your car.
They would fuck with you.
A lot of those union guys would be like, "Hey, dickhead."
You're literally buying something that takes away food from the table of the people that live here.
So it's hearkening for an era of like...
Nationalistic protectionism, right?
And if you do, I mean, again, I also am not an economist in any stretch of the imagination, but I do know that if you engage in protectionism, the other countries engage in protectionism.
That's the like, they don't say, okay, we'll fine.
You protect all your goods and services and we'll keep importing your stuff.
We'll keep finding the money somehow to keep paying for it, to keep getting those American dollars to buy those cars.
We don't know how we're going to get those American dollars.
Like, you know, we'll just magic them up from somewhere without selling you anything like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just, it's more complicated than what and how they represent it.
It is.
And it's fine for them to chat about it as well.
It's just the kind of notion that they're going to sort it out and stuff.
It's the notion that it's really simple, that it just takes a bit of leadership, a bit of patriotism, a bit of grit, and Choco Willick is going to start fabricating chips.
It's easy because we're a can-do people, the spirit that won World War II.
It's just like...
Like listening to small children talk about, I don't know, space.
Well, the extension of that is I was pointing out that they do have expertise in martial arts and military stuff and things like that.
And there's these references that Joe makes to that experience, meaning that they're like the tough people who are...
Able to respond properly to COVID.
So, like, for example...
That's the difference.
You're a Navy SEAL who's been to war.
And you're also a black belt in jujitsu.
So, again, you're used to getting fucking strangled all the time.
It's like this...
COVID was a lot easier on me than Dean Lister, I can tell you how much, bro.
Exactly.
It's like dealing with real problems and real scary shit and real adversity makes other people's adversity seem pale in comparison.
Matt, just to note there as well, the examples he gives is like training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and being a Navy SEAL.
These two versions of adversity, dealing with adversity.
Now, I'm not going to say Navy SEALs.
I'm not familiar with dealing with adversity and that that is real, potentially life and death stuff that they get up to.
But Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is slightly different.
And, you know, you might have thought it was, you know, an offhand comment, but...
You, though, you have an outlet for conflict in Jiu Jitsu, like a very...
Real outlet for conflict.
You know what I'm saying?
Most people go through life without any real conflict.
They don't have real conflict.
So when conflict comes up in text form, it's very disturbing to them.
If you have a real outlet for conflict, like someone's genuinely trying to strangle you, like a grown man who's really good at it.
It's so much more...
Real and significant than this text bullshit from some fat kid in his fucking basement.
Yeah.
So yes, I'm at like, if you do BJJ, you've experienced real danger and car.
I've done BJJ.
I've been choked by big men and women as well.
And I've experienced being blacked out and various other things.
And I've choked people out.
Do you feel like a better person for it?
Well, it definitely makes me not scared of the internet because it, like, shut the fuck up.
Shut the fuck up.
It's a training environment.
You know, you're safe.
It is not like that.
So it's just that I'm not saying BJJ isn't a good thing, but this notion that it's like life and death in the same way and, you know, makes you, it's just, it's so silly, Matt.
It's so silly.
Maybe see the thing, fine, but the appeal to.
Oh, real martial artists.
That's why we know how to deal with COVID.
You know, we're not afraid of internet bullies.
Like, oh, wow.
Yeah.
No, no.
It just goes back to that theme that was pretty strong, that they're pretty special people.
Yeah.
Yes.
Red-blooded leaders, courageous.
They know how to shoot things and wrestle people.
And they're individuals, Chris.
They're rugged men.
They're better than us.
Yeah.
Well, they could, you know.
They could definitely kill us.
So there's that.
But so to wrap up my, well, you know, usually we try and say, hang on, hang on.
You said they could kill us, but you know, we went through this, like we discussed that we could probably take down an elephant, not in like a head to head in a fight, but we'd, we'd, we'd build a trap.
We'd make a pit trap or something like that.
I think something like that could work.
Yeah, it could.
Just sprinkle some supplement pills over a badly disguised hole or something.
Vitamin D. Vitamin D is over there, right?
It'd be like the Hunger Games.
We'd be the clever, sneaky ones.
I'm sure we could answer that.
That's right.
Yeah.
Keep thinking that, Matt.
So, you know, trying to finish on something good.
There was sensible advice in this episode.
We played some of it already.
I think this is a nice clip to round off, at least end on a high note.
So you have to learn to go, okay, I see what's happening here.
Okay, let me listen.
Let me get some more perspective.
That's why when I do address, because I will occasionally address something that's happening, like a current event type thing.
I might even give it a week, two weeks, when the Afghanistan thing went down, that disaster.
I was waiting to see how it unfolded, and then finally I kind of put out some word about what I thought should happen.
Yeah.
Look, I heard this too, Chris, and actually in the first episode I listened to, the one from a year ago with Jocko, Jocko came off pretty well.
He talked more about the stuff that you could tell.
It motivated him or enthused him more, which was about leadership, about showing people how to take responsibility and to deal with their emotions and stressful situations.
It's self-helpy stuff and it's pretty generic, but it was fine.
It was pretty good.
I struggled to find something from Joe that I could say that I kind of liked.
Could you find something?
Yeah, in fairness, my good stuff folder is pretty much Jocko.
I think Jocko in the right environment, I'm not saying he's not a right wing susceptible guy, but he also, he does seem a little bit more critical than Joe and a bit more reserved.
I don't know.
He may be benefiting from the comparison, but yeah.
No, I got that sense too.
A lot of times it was Joe who would Lead him back and draw him into some culture war bullshit or conspiracy bullshit.
And he was happy to go along with it, but that's what people do, I guess.
Yeah.
So nothing good for Joe at all, eh?
Poor Joe.
We can't think of...
I mean, what have I got here?
I mean, I can't think of anything, but then I've had six hours.
I'm scarred.
The emotional labor that I've had to invest.
Hi, I've got one, I suppose, which I'll let stand just as Joe, you know, saying it like it is.
He's just, this is his wisdom, okay?
Let's not bespoil it after he offers it.
I have a whole bit about it in my act.
I'll tell you after the podcast.
But it's infuriating, this idea that...
You know you can't say you know well when I was younger I was fucking retarded because when I was younger I thought in a dumb way.
It doesn't mean I'm saying mentally impaired.
I don't use that word.
Ever, if I'm talking about someone who has Down syndrome, I use it where people are slow to learn.
They're thinking the wrong things.
They're involved in the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories.
That's what the word's for.
It means different things depending upon when you use it.
Yeah.
I have a whole bit about it in my act.
I'll tell you after the podcast.
How was that, Matt?
Pretty good?
That was all right.
Yeah.
But is it?
Is it now?
Well...
You know, whatever.
That's it.
That's your wisdom from Joe.
Yeah, I think we've summed up a couple of times overall, so I'm going to keep this really brief.
I'm just going to say, like, I'm not outraged at Joe having an MMA podcast.
I'm not outraged at him being a right wing partisan or an anti-vax guy.
The thing that annoys me is he doesn't know that he's Any of those things.
And that other smarter people online will defend them to the death that he isn't.
And if you've listened this far, you've got this thing and you're still think, well, you know, he's pretty balanced.
He's, he's just the, you know, he's got opinions all over the political spectrum.
Well, good for you.
That's not my take on it.
Yep.
Well, I'll want to sign that.
Yeah.
Look, here's my take on him.
One, he's a right-wing partisan.
As you said, he doesn't know it.
Two, he personifies being a total epistemic casualty, complete inability to get good information, evaluate sources, and he's a conspiracy theorist.
He's got a total lack of self-awareness that he is doing these things.
He is the person reacting to the clickbait headlines because they trigger his emotions and that he is straightaway just painting.
The other side of politics in the worst kind of light and letting off his side easily.
He doesn't seem to be aware of that, again, as you say.
Complete double standards.
He's an anti-vaxxer.
Absolutely.
And his general outlook is not one of just a guy in the street, a guy in a bar.
It's this kind of individualism which valorizes strength and power and leadership and being courageous and patriotic.
People like that, you know, who've got the ability to, you know, have saunas and, you know, food and medical stuff, you know, talk about like, you know, rich people, rich people, right?
And strong men, right?
That's, that's the outlook.
And it jibes really nicely with the economic nationalism.
And stuff as well.
And we didn't pick this particular episode because, well, this is the one where it's really bad or whatever.
There were a much worse ones, including the most recent one where he has a serious, crazy anti-vaxxer on.
I was just going to say, there's okay ones too.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
There's okay ones too.
We picked this one just because he was speaking to someone who seemed a lot like him.
And so therefore, because he's an interviewer.
We want it to be about Joe and not about the person he was interviewing.
And so Jocko Willick is someone who's a lot like Joe and they would spin off each other.
That's why we chose it.
So, you know, I've listened to six hours now of Joe and boy, oh boy.
You've mentioned that.
Not enough.
Not enough.
I mean, thank you to all the patrons out there, but man, I didn't get paid in.
Nearly enough to deal with this shit.
It was so awful.
I've listened to audio books and I wish I could be doing anything right now apart from listening to more of this.
I can see no value in it whatsoever.
It wasn't funny.
It wasn't entertaining.
It didn't give any kind of interesting insights to me.
It was shit.
It was terrible.
This is what people like.
This is what people like these days.
Reality TV and Joe Rogan podcast.
It did not spark joy.
Matt is the nice one, remember?
It did not spark joy for him, the man.
So if you like Joe, that's fine.
Just know what you're consuming.
That's the point.
That's all.
Yep.
Yep.
All right.
Bye bye, boldies.
Okay.
Slap your heads.
You know, off you go.
Give speeches about leadership and talk about MMA.
That's better.
That would be better.
That would be better.
Talk about movies.
Talk about movies you like.
Talk about.
I don't know.
Not Chinese ones.
Yeah, not Chinese ones.
Talk about hunting.
Talk about hunting.
Do a podcast.
Talk about hunting.
I'm sure those ones are perfectly fine.
Don't give them ideas, Matt.
Like the best way to skin a deer.
I'm sure they know great stuff about that, but that is useful.
He's talked about that.
He's talked about that enough.
He had to nuge into all and just talk endlessly about hunting.
Good.
Stick to that.
Stick to that.
Stay away from the COVID stuff.
That's not your strength.
No, it is not.
So, okay.
Done.
Dustin, bye, Joe.
You were worse than Scott Adams.
Congratulations.
You made Matt really upset.
We're not happy.
We're not happy.
So Rogan Decoded review of reviews time, Matt.
That's it.
Great.
My favorite time.
Slap the baldy MMA star on the head for good luck.
Yep.
Good luck, Joe.
Hopefully one of these days, uh, coherent thought will penetrate that dome of yours.
No, Matt, he's going to come on the show and you're going to have to take all those mean things back.
Be careful.
That's why, that's why I feel safe insulting him because I know him way beneath his nose.
If he comes on the show, the whole episode would just be apologizing for what we've said.
I'm not going to apologize to Joe.
Reviews.
And we have...
No, we didn't have that many critical reviews this time, though.
We've only got people saying how amazing we are.
This is going to be awkward.
Yeah.
But there were some funny ones, so let me see.
Well, I've got one that's quite short, and then I'll do a longer one.
And I will say that I was arguing with someone on Twitter.
It's strange, you know, that would happen.
And they were saying that because I, you know, get into these debates, that the burden of civility is on me because they were saying I was being too mean.
They said, you know, I have the burden of civility.
And I want to say for the podcast as well, for the Twitter world, I do not acquiesce.
To the burden of civility as a universal good.
It's okay to be blunt and harsh at times.
And it's even helpful.
Some people deserve it, Matt.
So I'm just saying, don't come here expecting that.
You refuse that burden.
Put that burden down.
No one else could care it.
Yeah, I never signed up for that.
I never signed up for that.
So, the first review is short, and it says, a funny way to learn!
Both of you are as clinical as any clinical psychologist.
Regards from Costa Rica.
Alan, Jungian clinical psychologist.
So, endorsed by philosophers, clinical psychology.
You just got the green light.
To use the psychologist's label.
At last, Matt.
It's 75. You finally got it.
I'm not sure how I feel about Jungian psychologists, though.
They're weird.
They're strange.
They're like Freudians, but more strange.
They just endure.
So they're great.
They're great.
Yep.
They're fine.
Embrace your inner archetypes.
The wizened old man and the young hero.
What's that guy with the golden hair?
Samson.
That's right.
I'm exactly like him.
You're Frodo and I've Gandalf.
Like an aggressive, weirdly aggressive.
Frodo wasn't aggressive.
What Lord of the Rings did you see?
Like Gollum.
That's too harsh.
Even I wouldn't go there.
So this one I like.
It's by Lost in the California, which is a good username.
And the title is pretty, pretty good.
A reference to Cobra enthusiasm.
So, thankful to Dave Pizarro from Very Bad Wizards for recommending this podcast.
Good job, Dave.
You're earning the money.
Chris's sarcasm and Matt's stoic and well-balanced takes are a perfect antidote against the grotesque arrogance.
Of some of the characters they cover.
I like that you get, you know, stoic, well-balanced, and I have sarcasm, but that's a weapon of choice.
Thanks to these guys, I'll never have to listen to the Weinsteins, Peterson, or even Sam Harris.
They are doing it for me, and I can just enjoy decoding the gurus while driving my kids around town.
My kids?
Not.
The biggest fans.
Mine aren't either.
Mine aren't either.
There we go.
There's no negative, Matt.
They're all positive.
People love us.
You like us.
You really like us.
We're providing a valuable service and interposing ourselves between gurus and an unsuspecting public.
You know that meme where the army guy is there and there's all the arrows and stuff?
That's us.
It is.
We are martyrs.
It's true.
Six hours of Rogan.
Did you know?
Did I mention that?
Did I mention that?
Because then six hours, I could have spent fucking hell doing anything.
Yeah, well.
But what about those engines?
So before we go, Matt, we need to give a shout out to our patrons.
Important not to forget these kind of things, the people that support us.
So lovely, lovely patrons.
This month.
First, I want to mention, of course, Steve Dondley, who is a Galaxy Brain Guru and helped me out with getting the audio for this episode.
So thank you very much, Steve.
And I also want to mention Nodge and Paul Han.
These are all Galaxy Brain Gurus.
They're in the constellation floating around, helping us
to Joe Rogan's content.
Dondely, Nudge, and Pale Hands.
Something like that.
Yep. You got it.
You got it.
So thank you, your galaxy brain.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.
And you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
So...
Revolutionary geniuses, Matt.
There are those people as well.
And I'm going to mention this week, Alicia Mahoney, Amber Buchanan, and Brian Ozinga.
So that's like Bozinga.
Brian Ozinga.
Those are our revolutionary geniuses for this week.
What do you say to that, Matt?
I say, that's excellent.
Thank you for being revolutionary geniuses.
You cut out what you were saying, so I can't mispronounce anyone.
James, I'm sorry to everyone.
You'll miss out on that.
Well, you got me saying that.
Isn't that enough?
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
And our last are conspiracy hypothesizers.
Not to be forgotten, Matt.
Today we have five of them.
Good luck, old man.
Kurt Foster, Paul Bowman, Marcus, Ben Mack, Peter Astrom.
You've given the game away now, Matt, at the final stages.
You are lovely conspiracy hypothesizers, and we appreciate you greatly.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Thank you, Brett Weinstein.
You've done quite enough.
So that's that.
And we've got other stuff coming up, Matt.
We usually mention who the next guru is going to be, right?
And there's this thing that we've said a million times that will happen.
It will come.
We're going to do the episode with Aaron Schwartz.
Sorry, Aaron Schwartz.
Aaron Ramanoids.
Matthew Swift, Aaron Schwartz.
There is a guy called Aaron Schwartz.
Wasn't he like a...
Pioneer of web.
I think they're both Jewish names.
That's probably the only connection.
Just like Matthew Smith and Matthew Brown are both boring names.
Your brain is an open book.
It's not a bad person to get him mixed up with.
He was a legendary pioneer for open source.
Yeah, fighting back against censorship.
So, yeah, it's a compliment.
It's a compliment that I confused Aaron.
They both wore glasses.
So, Aaron Rabinowitz with James Lindsay, Holocaust feuding James Lindsay.
So, we're going to do that.
But, you know, we've talked about this, Matt.
We warned him.
There's a whole meta universe of...
This episode will collapse around, but we're going to dip back into the Bobaverse, the Dharma of Bob, Bob Wright, Robert Wright, an ex-interview guest at that.
So this is a first.
We're breaking new ground here.
We've interviewed someone.
Now we're going to decode the interviewee.
He was too snarky.
He was too cheeky.
So we decided we're going to, we need to take him down.
He's getting too big for his boots.
And so we're going to...
Well, we like Bob a lot.
Very much so.
But we like a lot of bad stuff.
So that's no...
You can't tell from that.
Look, I wasn't going to give him that much of a compliment.
So don't worry.
I was just going to say that we thought it would be an interesting case because we like Bob's approach.
And he does have...
Many of the characteristics that are kind of associated with gurus, he has, like, all-encompassing worldview that, in some ways, his, like, introspective practices is connected to his political outlook and so on,
right, as he detailed recently.
So there's a worldview, and, you know, he has the click beauty title, Why Buddhism is True, and so on.
But as we all know...
Bob is also a self-deprecating guru, which is very rare.
And a genuinely self-deprecating guru who is also able to argue with people and not cut all bridges.
So he did an episode kind of because we were discussing asking him for content of his that would be good to look at.
So he did a recent episode outlining his philosophy after I told him we can't use that.
Because he would be creating it to be decoded.
But it doesn't matter.
But he introduces it by saying, well, I was going to make this, but the decoding guru guys, but they're not going to use it, but I thought it would be good to make anyway.
And now we're going to use it.
Did you follow that logic?
You see, now it's fine.
Because he didn't know.
It's nine-dimensional chess.
The question is...
Did he play us?
Was this his game?
Like, he knew that if he says that, then we will think it's okay to use it.
Who's winning here, Matt?
I don't know.
It's hard to say.
It's a complex dance that is being undertaken.
But we've already heard this and talked about it.
And it's interesting.
Yeah, it's interesting.
We've got a lot to tear down.
A lot to tear you down, Bob.
We're going to get there.
And also...
It's very similar to Rogan.
He's just, you know, much the same interests.
Yeah, like he's into the armored cars and the, you know, the NMA.
The metal, handcrafted knives.
Most people don't know that about Bob, his fascination with knives.
Yeah, the outtakes from the episodes we did were just hours of knives.
I mean, we cut all that stuff out because, you know.
So you'll get all that on the episode.
So we're going to do him.
And this will prove to all our critics that we can do critical episodes on people that we like, or probably it will reveal what cucks we are.
We'll see.
But Bob, we are coming for you.
So watch out.
Watch out.
Yeah.
So that's the next episode.
Should you have not had enough of us after however many hours it is after we edited it down, then you can find more episodes on the podcast that you listed to, or you can find us on the Patreon where we post extra episodes and we'll have the Garometer for Joe Rogan.
We'll have some extra episodes over Christmas, Decoding Academia stuff, so you can go there and join.
Apart from that, you can email us at decodingthegurus@gmail.com.
Follow us on Twitter@GurusPod.
We're on Instagram and Facebook under various names.
Good luck to find us.
And we have a Discord and Reddit, which again, you can find if you can use Google.
Just, you know, give it a shot.
Yeah, I'm glad this one's over.
I can honestly say I've never gotten so little out of six hours.
And you, I just remembered that you listen to these things at like, you know, three or four times speed or something.
Whereas I am listening at one time speed.
That's not possible.
I couldn't do that.
It wouldn't be acceptable to my brain.
So that's your own fault.
You need to level up.
Don't complain.
So, yes.
Okay, so everybody...
Thank you very much, Matt.
You go grubble at the feet of your muscle master and yeah, do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll do.
Yeah.
We'll do.
Someone, someone like Joe, I guess.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
We had two muscle masters in the show.
So yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Oh, there's a little secret.
You know, I said, I'll give you Irish slang sometimes at the end just for it.
Yeah.
You want to know.
Yeah.
So last time I told you banjax means broken.
Dander.
Yeah.
Going for an aimless walk.
Dandering.
I was just dandering.
Interesting.
I got banjacks on a dander, is something that you could say, but you wouldn't really say, because that would mean you got heavily drunk on the Nameless Walk, which would be a problem.
You've got issues.
So, yeah.
Put that into your memory file.
Yeah, when I go to Ireland one of these days, I'll be able to fit right in.
I'll never notice.
Like an anthropologist, I was just on a dander, and I saw a banjacks car.
